Fisher, Anthony In 1834 convicts of the Norfolk Island penal colony conspired to overpower the troops and take possession of the island. A gang on its way to work turned on their guards. Others, having feigned illness and been transferred to hospital, broke their chains and came to their assistance. But the third wave, of farm workers with farm implements, arrived too late to be of any help. In the fiasco that followed several were killed and after a trial (...) in Sydney thirty-one men were sentenced to death. (shrink)

Supporting families of people with developmental disabilities from culturally diverse backgrounds is receiving increased attention in the era of globalisation. However, there is little information about how disability policy and cultural values work together to support families. This article examined how disability policy and Chinese cultural values influence family care of children and young people with developmental disabilities. By comparing qualitative interview data from Chinese families in Taipei (15) and Sydney (10), we analysed how their expression of cultural values (...) in family care differs by policy context, relative to ethics of care claims for recognition, rights and redistribution. We found that positive expressions of Chinese culture in family care fade if policies do not complement them. Policies can alleviate potential tension with cultural values in three ways: reinforcing family capacity to care; ensuring the rights of both family caregivers and people with disabilities; and extending care choices for families. These approaches resonate with ethics of care principles. We argue that culturally responsive disability policy for families means working with cultural values to achieve ethics of care. This implies that incorporating principles of ethics of care could inform cultural responsiveness in disability policy development. (shrink)

This new and expanded edition of The Logic of Real Arguments explains a distinctive method for analysing and evaluating arguments. It discusses many examples, ranging from newspaper articles to extracts from classic texts, and from easy passages to much more difficult ones. It shows students how to use the question 'What argument or evidence would justify me in believing P?', and also how to deal with suppositional arguments beginning with the phrase 'Suppose that X were the case.' It aims to (...) help students to think critically about the kind of sustained, theoretical arguments which they commonly encounter in the course of their studies, including arguments about the natural world, about society, about policy, and about philosophy. It will be valuable for students and their teachers in a wide range of disciplines including philosophy, law and the social sciences. (shrink)

Features include a comprehensive review of existing material, combined with new perspectives to equip students for the challenges in the work environment; chapter overviews and student learning objectives offer a solid and useful framework in which to organise study; diagrams and charts present overviews and contexts for the subject to act as useful revision aids; effective pedagogy including a review of the arguments considered, a menu of seminar topics, and questions in every chapter, serving as an ideal basis for seminar (...) study; and additional open-ended simulations to allow students to work through unfolding scenarios. (shrink)

This volume is the first collection of original essays on the related issues of gender and feminism approached phenomenologically.

A fresh analysis of the just war tradition that addresses key contemporary security challenges, including the changing nature of war, military pre-emption and torture, the morality of the Iraq war, and humanitarian intervention.

The emergence of new platforms for public communication, public deliberation, and public action presents new possibilities for forming, organizing, and mobilizing public bodies, which invite philosophical reflection concerning the standards we currently look to for coordinating public movements and for evaluating their effects. Developing a broad understanding of public philosophy, this article begins with the view of philosophy and intellectual freedom articulated in Kant's publicly oriented writings. We then focus on the power of philosophical discourse to form and further articulate (...) public bodies. Drawing on Dewey's work, we discuss the role of philosophical discourse in the articulation of publics into self-regulated, sovereign entities. We conclude with an account of how publishing itself might come to play an important role in the practice of public philosophy in a digital age. (shrink)

Background: Recent research demonstrates that people sometimes make different medical decisions for others than they would make for themselves. This finding is particularly relevant to end-of-life decisions, which are often made by surrogates and require a trade-off between prolonging life and maintaining quality of life. We examine the impact of decision role, patient age, decision maker age and multiple individual differences on these treatment decisions. Methods: Participants read a scenario about a terminally ill cancer patient faced with a choice between (...) an aggressive chemotherapy regimen that will extend life by two years and palliative treatments to control discomfort for one remaining month. Participants were randomly assigned to one of three decision roles (patient, physician, or an abstract other) and the scenario randomly varied whether the patient was described as 25 or 65-years old. Results: When deciding for a 65-year old patient, approximately 60% of participants selected aggressive chemotherapy regardless of decision role. When deciding for a 25-year old patient, however, participants were more likely to select chemotherapy for a patient (physician role) or another person (abstract other) than for themselves (70%, 67%, and 59%, respectively). In addition, confidence that powerful others (eg, physicians) control one’s health, as well as respondents’ age and race, consistently predicted treatment choices. Conclusions: Patient age appears to influence medical decisions made for others but not those that we make for ourselves. These findings may help to explain the discord that often occurs when younger cancer patients refuse life-extending treatments. (shrink)

Donald C. Williams was a key figure in the development of analytic philosophy. This book will be the definitive source for his highly original work, which did much to bring metaphysics back into fashion. It presents six classic papers and six previously unpublished, revealing his full philosophical vision for the first time.

This look at Gassendi’s philosophy and science illuminates his contributions to early modern thought and to the broader history of philosophy of science. Two keys to his thought are his novel picture of acquiring and judging empirical belief, and his liberal account of criteria for counting empirical beliefs as parts of warranted physical theories. By viewing his philosophical and scientific pursuits as part of one and the same project, Gassendi’s arguments on behalf of atomism can be fruitfully explained as licensed (...) by his empiricism. (shrink)

As the title of her book indicates, Zuckert’s approach to Kant’s Critique of Judgment differs somewhat from that taken by many recent commentators. Rather than focusing narrowly on aspects of the CJ that are directly relevant to a particular philosophical issue, Zuckert offers an interpretation of the work as a whole that is aimed at vindicating Kant’s claim concerning its unity. According to her interpretation, the “Critique of Aesthetic Judgment” and the “Critique of Teleological Judgment” are parts of an extended (...) argument for a temporal and teleological conception of human subjectivity that differs significantly from the conception of subjectivity Kant develops in his other works. In Zuckert’s view, this new conception of the judging subject provides the unifying theme of the two main parts of the CJ, but it also marks a problematic transition within Kant’s critical philosophy. The CJ moves beyond the formal structures characteristic of transcendental subjectivity in its concern with the contingent, particular materials of human experience, history, and culture. Even as he offers his own formal idealism in support of a generally Leibnizean way of. (shrink)

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural (...) theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. (shrink)

In his Languages of Art, Nelson Goodman proposes a theory of artistic notation that includes foundational requirements for any system of symbols we might use to specify and communicate the features of an artwork, in architecture or any other art form. Goodmans' theory usefully explains how notation can reveal linguistic-like phenomena of various art forms. But not all art forms can enjoy benefits of a full-blown notational system, in Goodman's view, and he suggests that architecture's symbol systems fall short in (...) this regard. It is a shortcoming of architecture, he believes, that its notation cannot communicate the sum of a given work's essential features. Against this view it may be argued that artworks are generally and inimically historical in character, such that an inability to capture this dimension may result in a failure to pick out the identity of a work. As a consequence, the suggestion of that inability looks like a shortcoming of the general notational theory rather than of the art form or its notation per se. I defend Goodman's background formalism against the criticism that an ahistoricist notation cannot possibly be adequate. But I reject his view that no actual architectural notation can satisfy the formal criteria of his theory. In particular, I propose that the foundational theory for Computer Aided Design (CAD) described by the architect William Mitchell satisfies Goodman's criteria and so yields a notation that enables communication of an architectural work's essential features. If, as I suggest, such a notation is feasible, then we have an additional result that Goodman foresees: a means of abstracting future architectural works from their historical contexts. This in turn yields a consequence at which Goodman only hints-that such architectural works can be intellectually grasped and physically constructed along purely formalist lines. One practical result here is that we introduce economical solutions to architectural design. On a theoretical level, we also expose the inessential character of historical properties to creating or understanding architecture, at least with respect to future possible works. (shrink)

These essays apply influential, pathbreaking psychological studies about women's lives to literature. In their analyses of fictional portraits, contributors both challenge and confirm psychological theories about female identity, about 'connection/separation' as developmental catalysts, and about the impact of gender on 'voice,' moral decision-making, and epistemology in relation to classical and contemporary literary texts, written by both women and men.

Moral reflection is the process through which persons come to perceive, analyze, judge, and decide moral problems, issues, and dilemmas. Because of its complex character, the process can be studied from a variety of perspectives. Psycho-genetic approaches, such as those of Lawrence Kohlberg, study the sequential stages through which individuals develop capacities for moral reasoning. Victor Turner, an anthropologist interested in the relationship between elements of structure and antistructure in society, considered the role of structured beliefs during periods of social (...) crises, while some sociologists have focused attention on the everyday structural roles played by norms in social life. Peter Berger's image of religion as a" sacred canopy" which provides a" nomizing" or stabilizing context for societies could be applied with equal justice to moral norms. Philosophers, in contrast to these considerations, have usually been concerned with the rational foundations for specific moral claims; with normative ethical theories and their applications, or with metaethical questions about the meaning and nature of moral utterances and the logic of moral reasoning. This restriction of philosophical interest to rational justification at various levels has led to an emphasis on two phases of the moral reflection process, analysis, and decision, at the expense of two other phases, of perception and resolution. Concentration on the universal and rational character of moral justification has also prevented attention from being given to some unique characteristics which distinguish moral reflection among persons involved in a crisis moral community, called into being by a breach in established social order from moral reflection among persons in everyday moral communities. The following remarks seek to (1) define the moral reflection process in an expanded sense, and then (2) discuss how that process works within crisis moral communities. (shrink)

A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-021-00565-2.

This is the third technical paper in a five part series on "ecocriticism" as it relates to the author's work on fear and fearlessness.... focused engagement with Desh Subba's philosophy of fearism in the last three years, and with his attempting to link Subba's notion of "fearism" and the "fearist perspective" with ecocriticism....

Taking up the notion of engineering as social experimentation, this paper argues that engineering research laboratory directors have a responsibility to inform graduate engineering students who participate in their research projects of the potential broader social dimensions of those projects. Informing engineers-in-the-making of the broader social dimensions of the research they are learning to conduct would help ensure their future capacity to act as ethically responsible social experimenters. The paper also argues that graduate engineers have a right to be informed (...) participants in activities that may have broader social dimensions than are recognized by formal research evaluation or educational processes. The process of obtaining the informed consent of graduate engineering students, if implemented effectively, would thus help ensure both their capacity to act as moral agents and their own moral integrity. Since the eventual outcomes of research can be uncertain, complex, and contested, most traditional institutional frameworks—such as principle-based codes of conduct and risk-benefit frameworks—provide an insufficient basis to inform engineers and citizens. Rather, we recommend an ongoing discursive process that explores a number of different actors, contexts, and scenarios, and that evolves with the social context of the engineering research in question. While this may seem burdensome to the engineering research process, it can be integrated directly into the group research meetings and mentorship activities that typically already go on. Moreover, it can actually be seen to benefit engineering practices. (shrink)

John Berry, a risk manager for a U.S.-based pharmaceutical firm (Best Co.), is assigned additional responsibilities when his territory is expanded to include the South America region. When an employee in one of Best Co.’s South American manufacturing facilities dies in a work-related incident, John must determine an appropriate response. In a business context that is increasingly global, ethical decisions are further complicated by cultural differences. This case considers thefactors influencing John as he weighs his options on how to resolve (...) this incident. The case further considers how cultural differences coupled with John’s limited cross-cultural sensitivities and personal viewpoint might inevitably skew his judgment. San Luis, the disguised name for this South American locale, is less litigious than John’s home country, the U.S. In light of these differences, the case raises a number of ethical questions. For example, how should an international corporation compensate an employee’s family for the employee’s work-related death – if at all? Are John’s own cultural limitations preventing him from doing the right thing? (shrink)

There can only ever have been, or that will ever continue to be one infinite visible physical condition that has endured, and will continue to endure eternally. The physicists’ contention that visible matter and invisible dark matter and empty space have somehow managed to coexist at the same time after the supposedly finite big bang explosive commencement of the universe billions of light years ago is utterly invalid. There is no empty space between the stars and the planets. There is (...) merely a contrast in visible physical appearance. As there are an infinite number of visible stars, there is no way they could be assembled in only finite types. There is no way that any two stars could be separated by billions of finite miles of empty space. All one has to do is to look up at the night sky in order to visually verify that the glaring neon white stars are clearly in view seen against the stark contrast of the visible black sky. (shrink)