This careful and engaging introduction to Aristotle equips readers of ancient philosophy and classics with an intellectual map that will guide their further exploration within the terrains of Aristotelian philosophy and logic. The book does not seek to provide a verdict or to persuade the reader of the usefulness of Aristotle's ideas. Instead it offers a comprehensive introduction to key philosophical areas while situating the reader within the ongoing intellectual debates on Aristotle's significance and relevance. Crowley's book allows an overview (...) of Aristotle's contributions and includes discussions on the Organon, the epitome of his logical treatises, his works on biology, nature and causation, metaphysics, citizenship, ethics and eudaimonia. The book is a valuable tool for readers interested in becoming acquainted with the work of Aristotle but most importantly for those who are keen to understand his many interpretations. (shrink)

Background: Patients in clinical settings are not lonely islands; they have relatives who play a more or less active role in their lives. Objectives: The purpose of this article is to elucidate the ethical challenges nursing staff encounter with patients’ next of kin and to discuss how these challenges affect clinical practice. Research design: The study is based on data collected from ethical group discussions among nursing staff in a nursing home. The discussions took place in 2011 and 2012. The (...) data were analysed and interpreted by using hermeneutic methodology. Ethical considerations: All the data have been anonymised and handled with confidentiality. Written informed consent was obtained from all participants. Findings: Ethical challenges relating to patients’ next of kin were found to be an issue frequently discussed in the groups. Our findings indicate that next of kin have different characteristics, categorised as ‘the professionals’ and ‘the shadows’. In this article, we will describe the next of kin’s characteristics and the ethical challenges and practical implications that nursing staff experience in this connection. Discussion: We will discuss the findings in the light of the four basic principles of medical ethics and propose interventions to help nurses manage ethical challenges related to next of kin. Conclusion: The study reveals the need to enhance nursing staffs’ communicative and ethical skills on an individual level, but most importantly, to establish routines in clinical settings for informing and following up next of kin in a systematic and structured way. (shrink)

According to much modern social psychology, behavioural economics and common sense, people's actions and beliefs are frequently the result of rapid intuitive thought rather than careful deliberation. Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, in their influential book, Nudge, synthesised the literature and used it as the basis for numerous policy ideas.1 Not least, they gave the word ‘nudge’ as a handy term to apply to all sorts of ways of taking advantage of people's psychological quirks without coercing or bribing them. But (...) while Nudge was long on ideas and enthusiasm, it was short on conceptual clarity. The idea of a nudge was inconsistent with some of the policies Thaler and Sunstein endorsed and their account of nudging's relation to freedom and paternalism was flawed.In Salvaging the concept of nudge, Yashar Saghai acts as a friendly critic who thinks nudging has plenty to offer the policy world but sees that it needs both conceptual clarity and ethical defence.2 He wants to show how some of ways of taking advantage of people's psychology could leave them as free as before and he is especially concerned with what I would describe as a question of manipulation: …. (shrink)

An interpretation is offered of Thrasymachus' account of the nature of justice and just action in book I of the 'Republic' which is internally consistent throughout on all important points. Just action is not defined in terms of its practical consequences, as many commentators assume, but rather in terms of its logical consequences 'vis-a-vis' just agents. When one man acts justly towards another, the performance of the just act renders the just agent vulnerable to unfair or unjust exploitation by those (...) with whom he deals. The "strong man", in Thrasymachus' sense, would thus never be a just man. It is argued that Socrates addresses himself to this position, but that, while the textual Thrasymachus is silenced, Socrates' best arguments are, in fact, inadequate to refute Thrasymachus. (shrink)

Superstring theory is an extension of conventional quantum field theory that allows for stringlike and branelike material objects besides pointlike particles. The basic foundations on which the theory is built are amazingly shaky, and, equally amazingly, it seems to be this lack of solid foundations to which the theory owes its strength. We emphasize that such a situation is legitimate only in the development phases of a new doctrine. Eventually, a more solidly founded structure must be sought.Although it is advertised (...) as a “candidate theory of quantum gravity”, we claim that string theory may not be exactly that. Rather, just like quantum field theory itself, it is a general mathematical framework for a class of theories. Its major flaw could be that it still embraces a Copenhagen view on the relation between quantum mechanics and reality, while any “theory of everything”, that is, a theory for the entire cosmos, should do better than that. (shrink)

[T. M. Scanlon] It is clearly impermissible to kill one person because his organs can be used to save five others who are in need of transplants. It has seemed to many that the explanation for this lies in the fact that in such cases we would be intending the death of the person whom we killed, or failed to save. What makes these actions impermissible, however, is not the agent's intention but rather the fact that the benefit envisaged does (...) not justify an exception to the prohibition against killing or the requirement to give aid. The difference between this explanation and one appealing to intention is easily overlooked if one fails to distinguish between the prospective use of a moral principle to guide action and its retrospective use to appraise the way an agent governed him or herself. Even if this explanation is accepted, however, it remains an open question whether and how an agent's intention may be relevant to the permissibility of actions in other cases. \\\ [Jonathan Dancy] My first four sections concentrate on the second section of Professor Scanlon's contribution, where he lays out his conception of moral principles and of the role they play in theory and practice. I will raise questions on the following issues: 1. Scanlon's initial introduction of the notion of a principle. 2. His rejection of the standard view that principles are concerned with the forbidding, permitting and requiring of actions. 3. His rejection of pro tanto conceptions of principles in favour of a conception of them as conclusive. 4. The resulting account of what it is for a principle to face and survive exceptions. Scanlon's discussion of these matters here both appeals to and is in some respects more detailed than the relevant section of his recent What We Owe to Each Other. The topic is interesting both for the role played by principles in Scanlon's present discussion of intention and permissibility, and more generally because of his account of wrongness: an act is wrong iff it is ruled out by principles that nobody could reasonably reject. The remainder of my contribution is concerned with the ostensible focus of IP, namely the relevance of agent-intentions to the permissibility of what is done. (shrink)

In social cognition, knowledge-based validation of information is usually regarded as relying on strategic and resource-demanding processes. Research on language comprehension, in contrast, suggests that validation processes are involved in the construction of a referential representation of the communicated information. This view implies that individuals can use their knowledge to validate incoming information in a routine and efficient manner. Consistent with this idea, Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated that individuals are able to reject false assertions efficiently when they have validity-relevant (...) beliefs. Validation processes were carried out routinely even when individuals were put under additional cognitive load during comprehension. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the rejection of false information occurs automatically and interferes with affirmative responses in a nonsemantic task. Experiment 4 also revealed complementary interference effects of true information with negative responses in a nonsemantic task. These results suggest the existence of fast and efficient validation processes that protect mental representations from being contaminated by false and inaccurate information. (shrink)

This chapter examines the philosophy of T. H. Green, the initial leading figure among the absolute idealists who dominated British philosophy in the late 19th century. Green sought to establish that the existence and nature of human beings, especially of the human mind, was not susceptible of a purely empirical or scientific explanation. He claimed that the only possible explanation involved reference to the existence of an Eternal Consciousness, which was gradually realizing itself in the temporal world, more especially in (...) the life of human beings. Further issues in his philosophy are examined, such as that things count as real only if they are in unchanging relations to each other, the difference between negative and positive freedom, the nature of moral choice, the superiority of a virtue ethic to a utilitarian one. (shrink)

Philosophers and psychologists generally hold that, in light of the empirical data, a subject lacks infallible access to her own mental states. However, while subjects certainly are fallible in some ways, I show that the data fails to discredit that a subject has infallible access to her own occurrent thoughts and judgments. This is argued, first, by revisiting the empirical studies, and carefully scrutinizing what is shown exactly. Second, I argue that if the data were interpreted to rule out all (...) such infallibility, the relevant psychological studies would be self-effacing. For they adopt a methodology where a subject is simply presumed to know her own second-order thoughts and judgments--as if she were infallible about them. After all, what she expresses as her second-order judgment is trusted as accurate without independent evidence — even though such judgments often misrepresent the subject’s first-order states. The upshot is that such studies do not discredit all infallibility hypotheses regarding self-attributions of occurrent states. (shrink)

In this paper I propose a solution to the qualitative version of David Miller's verisimilitude reversal argument. Miller (1974) shows that verisimilitude rankings are relative to language choice and hence, are not objective. My solution stems from a reply to an earlier solution proposed by Eric Barnes (1991). Barnes argues that the verisimilitude reversal problem can be solved by revealing an epistemic dimension. I show that Miller's problem cannot be solved by side-stepping foundational metaphysical claims as his epistemic solution suggests. (...) Rather, a substantive metaphysical basis grounds identity relations among properties. The problem of verisimilitude cannot be solved without embracing the fundamental metaphysical distinctions between basic and composite properties that ground the relationship of partial identity among properties. (shrink)

Some philosophers have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is no God. For Sartre and Nagel, for example, a God of the traditional classical theistic sort would constrain our powers of self-creative autonomy in ways that would severely detract from the meaning of our lives, possibly even evacuate our lives of all meaning. Some philosophers, by contrast, have thought that life could only be meaningful if there is a God. God and the Meanings of Life is interested (...) in exploring the truth in both these schools of thought, seeking to discover what God could and couldn't do to make life meaningful (as well as what he would and wouldn't do). Mawson espouses a version of the 'amalgam' or 'pluralism' thesis about the issue of life's meaning – in essence, that there are a number of different legitimate meanings of 'meaning' (and indeed 'life') in the question of life's meaning. According to Mawson, God, were he to exist, would help make life meaningful in some of these senses and hinder in some others. He argues that whilst there could be meaning in a Godless universe, there could be other sorts of meaning in a Godly one and that these would be deeper. (shrink)

My purpose in what follows is not so much to defend the basic principle of utilitarianism as to indicate the form of it which seems most promising as a basic moral and political position. I shall take the principle of utility as offering a criterion for two different sorts of evaluation: first, the merits of acts of government, social policies, and social institutions, and secondly, the ultimate moral evaluation of the actions of individuals. I do not take it as implying (...) that the individual should live his life on the basis of constant evaluations of this sort. For there are different levels of decision making each with its appropriate criteria. For example, we each inevitably make many of our decisions from the point of view of our own personal self-fulfilment and this cannot regularly take a directly utilitarian form, nor should the utilitarian want it to do so. His claim is at most that we should sometimes review our life from the point of view of a kind of impersonal moral truth of a universalistic utilitarian character. (shrink)

The world appears to conscious creatures in terms of experienced sensory qualities, but science doesn't find sensory experience in that world, only physical objects and properties. I argue that the failure to locate consciousness in the world is a function of our necessarily representational relation to reality as knowers: we won't discover the terms in which reality is represented by us in the world as it appears in those terms. Qualia -- arguably a type of representational content -- will therefore (...) not be found in the physical world as characterized in experience or science. Instead, consciousness constitutes a subjective, representational reality for cognitive systems such as ourselves, and the physical world is a represented objective reality. I suggest that naturalistic approaches to explaining consciousness should acknowledge the non-objectivity of experience, and be constrained by evidence that consciousness accompanies certain sorts of behaviour-controlling representational functions carried out by complex, physically instantiated mind-systems. I evaluate a variety of current hypotheses about consciousness, and suggest that a mature science of representation may help explain why, perhaps as matter of representational necessity, experience arises as a natural but not objectively discoverable phenomenon. (shrink)

Current debates surrounding Aristotle's Politics involve attempts to explain the role of political participation in the pursuit of Aristotle's human telos, eudaimonia. Many argue that political participation is crucial to eudaimonia, equating the good man with the good citizen. Often this argument is based on Aristotle's labelling of humans as zoon politikon, or ‘political animal’, and the misleading translation of eudaimonia as ‘happiness’. We provide supported explanations of eudaimonia and zoon politikon which do not force us to equate the good (...) man and the good citizen. We illustrate Aristotle's analogy between the eudaimon man and the eudaimon polis and emphasize the role political participation sometimes plays in the pursuit of eudaimonia. On the basis of this evidence, we argue that Aristotle did not equate the good man with the good citizen necessarily, nor did he find political participation essential to eudaimonia. We then demonstrate that even without political participation, the polis plays a unique role in the pursuit of eudaimonia. (shrink)

Green agrees with Kant on the abstract character of moral law as categorical imperatives and that intentional dispositions are central to a moral justification of punishment. The central problem with Kant's account is that we are unable to know these dispositions beyond a reasonable estimate. Green offers a practical alternative, positing moral law as an ideal to be achieved, but not immediately enforceable through positive law. Moral and positive law are bridged by Green's theory of the common good through the (...) dialectic of morality. Thus, Green appears to offer an alternative that remains committed to Kantian morality whilst taking proper stock of our cognitive limitations. Unfortunately, Green fails to unravel fully Kant's dichotomy of moral and positive law that mirrors Green's solution, although Green offers a number of improvements, such as the importance of the community in establishing rights and linking the severity of punishment to the extent that a criminal act threatens the continued maintenance of a system of rights. (shrink)

After the French Revolution, the codification movement led to the introduction of the Dutch Civil Code and the Commercial Code of 1838. These codifications were generally regarded as the bedrock of a dogmatic system in which little space was left for customs and customary law. Mercantile jurists, such as Holtius and Levy, were opponents of the legalistic approach of the new codifications. They tried to separate mercantile law from civil law in order to protect mercantile law from excessive legalistic influences. (...) According to them, mercantile law was characterised by internationality, custom as its main source of law, continuity through an extended mercantile legal history and by good faith and mutual trust between the merchants. Out of these, the historicity and homogeneity of a strong community of merchants are particularly in line with a traditional and conservative view on society. Holtius and Levy, however, had little in common with their Christian-conservative contemporaries. On the one hand, they rather seemed to foreshadow the kind of liberal-conservatism as expressed by Hayek during the 20th century. On the other hand, their ideas have much in common with different lex mercatoria –traditions developed by authors as Goldman and Schmitthoff. On the aspects of historicity and internationality Holtius and Levy seem to have much in common with Hayek whereas concerning communality and the legal nature of customary law there are more similarities with the lex mercatoria-traditions. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Interactivity and Enaction in Human Cognition” by Matthew Isaac Harvey, Rasmus Gahrn-Andersen & Sune Vork Steffensen. Upshot: Enaction is a diverse research program and some of its texts can be interpreted in terms of a critical contrast to interactivity. Yet much of the former has already started to move in a direction favored by the latter: toward systematic studies of how human activity is shaped by social, cultural, and technological influences. Interactivity could therefore help (...) enaction to provide a better account of such highly mediated and augmented forms of sense-making. (shrink)

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be (...) preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

One of four laws passed by Clodius early in 58 b.c. in some way modified the regulations governing obnuntiatio, the right possessed by magistrates and augurs to obstruct proceedings of the popular assemblies through announcement of unfavourable omens. The precise nature of the change is obscured by the fact that our main source, Cicero, describes it, as he does all of Clodius' legislation, in hyperbolic and polemical terms, alleging that it wholly abolished the right of obnuntiatio, a claim contradicted by (...) other evidence in his writings, which provide many examples of its continuing use. The later ancient sources repeat the substance of Cicero's main allegations and, accordingly, do little to help disentangle the facts from the hyperbole. Inadequate information about the earlier regulations relating to obnuntiatio, which were contained in two laws of the mid-second century, the Leges Aelia et Fufia, further hampers the search for the precise terms of Clodius' amendment. None of this, however, has discouraged speculation. The problem has exerted a peculiar fascination and has generated a succession of careful studies. Five main hypotheses have emerged: that the right of obnuntiatio was taken from curule magistrates; that it was taken from curule magistrates, but only in relation to legislative comitia; that it was taken from both curule magistrates and tribunes, but only in relation to legislative comitia; that it was abolished entirely, but soon restored by senatorial annulment of the reform; that it was left intact, but the assemblies were empowered to disallow it on any given occasion. (shrink)

In what is clearly an important development related to research integrity and the protection of human research subjects, the U.S. government has instituted two new training requirements as a condition of receiving federal financial support. First, the National Institutes of Health is requiring, as a condition of funding, that key research personnel involved in human subject research complete education “in the protection of human subjects.” Evidence that key personnel have completed this training must be provided in NIH grant applications or (...) contract proposals.The NIH education policy will eventually be superseded by a more broadly applicable instructional policy for the “responsible conduct of research,” which will be promulgated by the Department of Health and Human Service's Office of Research Integrity and the Public Health Service. The instructional policy will apply to all persons engaged in any research or research training with PHS support. Presently, the only version of the policy is in draft form. (shrink)

The pages of the history of science record thousands of instances of similar discoveries having been made by scientists working independently of one another. Sometimes the discoveries are simultaneous or almost so; sometimes a scientist will make anew a discovery which, unknown to him, somebody else had made years before.

As is well known, many editors, following Valckenaer, reject the bracketed line altogether; but the omission leaves the opening clause with a very unsatisfactory ending. μπρέποντας αίθέρι, heavily stressed by its position, seems to form little less than an anticlimax, unless we assume that the stars could hardly be expected to shine in the sky. On the other hand, when line 7 is added, έμπρέποντας αίθέρ στέρας brings out clearly the fact that only certain conspicuous stars or constellations are meant—those (...) which serve as guides to the operations of agriculture and navigation, such as the Pleiades, Arcturus, and Orion, as we may see from Hesiod, Op. 609 onwards. (shrink)

The relativistic Schrödinger theory (RST) for N-fermion systems is further elaborated with respect to three fundamental problems which must emerge in any relativistic theory of quantum matter: (i) emergence/suppression of exchange forces between identical/non-identical particles, (ii) self-interactions, (iii) non-relativistic approximation. These questions are studied in detail for two- and three-particle systems but the results do apply to a general N-particle system. As a concrete demonstration, the singlet and triplet configurations of the positronium groundstate are considered within the RST framework, including (...) a discussion of the corresponding hyperfine splitting. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “Homeostats for the 21st Century? Simulating Ashby Simulating the Brain” by Stefano Franchi. Upshot: Franchi argues that Ashby’s homeostat can be usefully understood as a thought experiment to explore the theory that life is fundamentally heteronomous. While I share Franchi’s interpretation, I disagree that this theory of life is a promising alternative that is at odds with most of the Western philosophical tradition. On the contrary, heteronomy lies at the very core of computationalism, and (...) this is precisely what explains its persistent failure to construct life-like agents. (shrink)

This volume is concerned with the concept of rationality and the interrelations between rationality, belief and desire in the explanation and evaluation of human action. The book is conceived and structured to represent some of the most important general differences of approach to these problems, and also to connect them with problems about the relation of individual to social behaviour which are of central interest to historians, social theorists and economists as well as to philosophers. The essays have all been (...) commissioned for this volume and have not appeared elsewhere. The idea for the book arose from the meetings of philosophers and social scientists sponsored by the Thyssen Foundation, and is therefore a continuation of the informal series begun by C. Hookway and P. Pettit Action and Interpretation. (shrink)

In the article, the organic principle of the Euroasian philosophy is studied. The organic principle acts as a basis of special style of thinking and a certain methodology of scientific knowledge here. The Euroasian methodology of studying of development of society allows establishing of the nature of communications between social processes and the phenomena of wildlife. In the article, the most important components of the Euroasian organic principle of thinking are shown: special terminology and possibilities of its application for the (...) description and forecasting of the social phenomena. Prerequisites of change of the style of thinking dominating in modern science are also noted. The author considers advantages of the organic principle of the Euroasian methodology in solution of national political, social-economic and cultural problems and in possible prospects of its use for formation of scientific methodology. The organic principle of thinking creates complex idea of reality, which can appear before us new, party unknown earlier. Lack of division of sensual experience and ‘pure reason‘, irrational and rational in organic thinking is unconditional advantage of organic approach. Organic principle presented by the Euroasian philosophical organization of the beginning of the twentieth century and continued by Lev Gumilev in the theory of ethnogenesis acts as alternative developed in the west of one-dimensional, mechanistic methodology. It can be told with confidence that owning all of variety of intellectual traditions is necessary for the modern humankind to become capable to realize global ecological threats and negative consequences of influence of culture in which ethics of individualism prevails. (shrink)

Next SectionDr Thomas Stockmann, the protagonist of Ibsen's play, An Enemy of the People, discovers a serious health threat in the Baths of his Norwegian town. The Baths have been marketed as a health resort to lure visitors. Dr Stockmann alerts officials about the problem and assumes that they will close the Baths until it is corrected. He is met with fierce resistance, however. His brother, the town's mayor, favors keeping the Baths open and correcting the problem gradually. He advances (...) multiple arguments that appeal to the economic interests of the town and Thomas's role-related obligation as a citizen. His wife, Katherine, wants him to cooperate with the mayor. She marshals several arguments that appeal to his obligations as a father. This paper reconstructs and examines the competing arguments, shows how Ibsen's play has both contemporary relevance and moral depth, and demonstrates how Dr Stockmann's responses can be interpreted as an argument that complying with his duties to protect the public health do not force him to renege on his core commitments as a parent and as a citizen. (shrink)

The scientific-philosophical world-view of Marxism is a negation of philosophy in the old, traditional meaning of that word. That is, Marxism represents a negation of any attempt to create a completed system of philosophical knowledge that would exhaust the object of its research and be independent of all the subsequent development of cognition and of the life of society. This negation is concrete, dialectical, and materialist, and constitutes a significant factor in the philosophical revolution wrought by Marx and Engels in (...) creating the philosophical system called dialectical and historical materialism, differing fundamentally from all prior philosophical systems. (shrink)

The Slovak political thought of the 19th century mingles with the nation-building efforts. According to the author the nationalists were one of the intellectual elites of Central Europe, which based their nation-building on ethnic ideology. This ideology embodied various elements, such as passive historicism, "prilepenectvo" and the will to become a historical subject. They made use of a non-political concept of nation as a language an cultural community, which gradually became politicized. The ultimate objective was the institutionalization of the nation, (...) defined originally non-politically. According to the author there are two ways of achieving this objective, conceived of as ideal types: the type A implies the institutionalization from above, based on an intervention of a power instance ; the type B implies the institutionalization resulting from gradual growth of national capacities in the political frame of Hungary of that time. These types correspond to different views of what is political activity. Nevertheless, the Slovak political thought of the 19th century did not go beyond the level of experimentation. (shrink)