In this paper I challenge the orthodox view of the significance of Platonic value problems. According to this view, such problems are among the central questions of epistemology, and answering them is essential for justifying the status of epistemology as a major branch of philosophical enquiry. I challenge this view by identifying an assumption on which Platonic value problems are based – the value assumption – and considering how this assumption might be resisted. After articulating a line of thought that (...) supports the assumption, I highlight one way of undermining it, which is to deny that we desire knowledge and not just (e.g.) true belief because we prefer knowledge to true belief. I then consider an attempt to undermine the value assumption in this way, inspired by Bernard Williams. I contend that Williams's argument fails, but also that seeing why it fails is instructive for future attempts to resist the value assumption. (shrink)

The mechanistic perspective has dominated biological disciplines such as biochemistry, physiology, cell and molecular biology, and neuroscience, especially during the 20th century. The primary strategy is reductionist: organisms are to be decomposed into component parts and operations at multiple levels. Researchers adopting this perspective have generated an enormous body of information about the mechanisms of life at scales ranging from the whole organism down to genetic and other molecular operations.

The essays in this volume were written by leading researchers on classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, quantum theory, and relativity. They detail central topics in the foundations of physics, including the role of symmetry principles in classical and quantum physics, Einstein's hole argument in general relativity, quantum mechanics and special relativity, quantum correlations, quantum logic, and quantum probability and information.

The pedagogical technique of the playful Plato, especially his ability to create living discourses that directly address the student, is the subject of Plato the Teacher. “The crisis of the Republic” refers to the decisive moment in his central dialogue when philosopher-readers realize that Plato’s is challenging them to choose justice by going back down into the dangerous Cave of political life for the sake of the greater Good, as both Socrates and Cicero did.

Eliminative materialism (or eliminativism) is the radical claim that our ordinary, common-sense understanding of the mind is deeply wrong and that some or all of the mental states posited by common-sense do not actually exist. Descartes famously challenged much of what we take for granted, but he insisted that, for the most part, we can be confident about the content of our own minds. Eliminative materialists go further than Descartes on this point, since they challenge of the existence of various (...) mental states that Descartes took for granted. (shrink)

P. T. Geach, notoriously, holds the Relative Identity Thesis, according to which a meaningful judgment of identity is always, implicitly or explicitly, relative to some general term. ‘The same’ is a fragmentary expression, and has no significance unless we say or mean ‘the same X’, where ‘X’ represents a general term (what Frege calls a Begriffswort or Begriffsausdruck). (P. T. Geach, Mental Acts (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), p. 69. I maintain that it makes no sense to judge whether (...) things are ‘the same’, or remain ‘the same’, unless we add or understand some general term - ‘the same F’. (P. T. Geach, Reference and Generality, third Edition (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1980), pp. 63f. I am arguing for the thesis that identity is relative. When one says ‘x is identical with y’, this, I hold, is an incomplete expression; it is short for ‘x is the same A as y’, where ‘A’ represents some count noun understood from the context of utterance - or else, it is just a vague expression of a half-formed thought. (P. T. Geach, ‘Identity,’ Review of Metaphysics 21 (1967-8), p. 3.) One of the ways Geach seeks to support this is by tying it to the well nigh universally admired Fregean thesis about cardinality. (shrink)

The final work of the esteemed philosopher William Demopoulos supplants logical empiricism's accounts of physical theories, which fail to satisfactorily engage modern physics. Arguing for a new appreciation of the tightly woven character of theory and evidence, Demopoulos offers novel insights into the distinctive nature of quantum reality.

That law is coercive is something we all more or less take for granted. It is an assumption so rooted in our ways of thinking that it is taken as a given of social reality, an uncontroversial datum. Because it is so regarded, it is infrequently stated, and when it is, it is stated without any hint of possible complications or qualifications. I will call this the “prereflective view,” and I want to examine it with the care it deserves.

The present paper offers some remarks on the significance of first order model theory for our understanding of theories, and more generally, for our understanding of the “structuralist” accounts of the nature of theoretical knowledge that we associate with Russell, Ramsey and Carnap. What is unique about the presentation is the prominence it assigns to Craig’s Interpolation Lemma, some of its corollaries, and the manner of their demonstration. They form the underlying logical basis of the analysis.

According to religious pluralism, the profound differences among the chief objects of adoration in the great religious traditions are largely due to the different ways in which a single transcendent reality is experienced and conceived in human life. The most prominent developer and defender of religious pluralism in the twentieth century is John Hick. Hick uses the expression ‘the Real’ to designate the transcendent reality ‘authentically experienced’ as the different gods and impersonal absolutes worshipped in the major religious traditions. A (...) central claim Hick makes is that, apart from some purely formal characteristics, the Real is ineffable in that the intrinsic properties making up its nature are beyond the scope of any human concepts. I explore this central claim and argue that it implies the dubious, if not incoherent, view that the Real in itself has neither one of many pairs of contradictory properties. (shrink)

Foundations of a General Theory of Manifolds [Cantor, 1883], which I will refer to as the Grundlagen, is Cantor’s first work on the general theory of sets. It was a separate printing, with a preface and some footnotes added, of the fifth in a series of six papers under the title of “On infinite linear point manifolds”. I want to briefly describe some of the achievements of this great work. But at the same time, I want to discuss its connection (...) with the so-called paradoxes in set theory. There seems to be some agreement now that Cantor’s own understanding of the theory of transfinite numbers in that monograph did not contain an implicit contradiction; but there is less agreement about exactly why this is so and about the content of the theory itself. For various reasons, both historical and internal, the Grundlagen seems not to have been widely read compared to later works of Cantor, and to have been even less well understood. But even some of the more recent discussions of the work, while recognizing to some degree its unique character, misunderstand it on crucial points and fail to convey its true worth. (shrink)

The German Stranger provides a guide to Leo Strauss that situates his thought in the context of National Socialism; by destroying any middle ground between 'Athens' and 'Jerusalem, ' Strauss undermined modernity's secular bulwark against political theology. Once National Socialism is understood as an atheistic religion re-enacted by post-Revelation 'philosophers, ' the German avatar of Plato's Athenian Stranger can be recognized as its principal theoreticia.

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)

In this paper, I approach the trolley problem from a different angle, and align the perspective with non-Western models of philosophy as instruction for life. I argue that the trolley problem is an...

The title refers to theories that require a certain sort of relation between X and an experience of S in order that S perceive X. The relation might be causal, counterfactual, doxastic, or otherwise. It is argued against such theories that there are possible cases in which X stands in the required relation to an experience of S and S does not perceive X and cases in which X is perceived though it does not stand in the required relation.

The simple systems methodology is a powerful reductionistic research strategy. It has problems as implemented in developmental genetics because the organisms studied are few and unrepresentative. Stronger inferences require independent arguments that key traits are widely distributed phylogenetically. Evolutionary and developmental mechanisms of generative entrenchment and self-organization provide possible support, and are also necessary components of a developmental systems approach.

William Vitek enlarges our understanding by treating the act of promising as a social practice and complex human experience. Citing engaging examples of promises made in everyday life, in extraordinary circumstances, and in literary works, Vitek grapples with the central paradox of promising: that human beings can intend a future to which they are largely blind. _Promising_ evaluates contemporary approaches to the topic by such philosophers as John Rawls, John Searle, Henry Sidgwick, P.S. Atiyah, and Michael Robbins but transcend (...) their more limited focus on promissory obligation. Vitek's innovative approach moves beyond theories of language, ethics, and law to unveil a complex human activity subject to shifting interpretations and changes in nature. (shrink)

Extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) is a form of life support for cardiac and/or pulmonary failure with unique ethical challenges compared to other forms of life support. Ethical challenges with ECMO exist when conventional standards of care apply, and are exacerbated during periods of absolute ECMO scarcity when “crisis standards of care” are instituted. When conventional standards of care apply, we propose that it is ethically permissible to withhold placing patients on ECMO for reasons of technical futility or when patients have (...) terminal, short-term prognoses that are untreatable by ECMO. Under crisis standards of care, it is ethically permissible to broaden exclusionary criteria to also withhold ECMO from patients who have a low likelihood of recovery, to maximize the overall number of lives saved. Unilateral withdrawal of ECMO against a patient’s preferences is unethical under conventional standards of care, but is ethical under crisis standards of care to increase access to ECMO to others in society. ECMO should only be rationed when true scarcity exists, and allocation protocols should be transparent to the public. When rationing must occur under crisis standards of care, it is imperative that oversight bodies assess for inequities in the allocation of ECMO and make frequent changes to improve any inequities. (shrink)

A central problem in the interpretation of non-relativistic quantum mechanics is to relate the conceptual structure of the theory to the classical idea of the state of a physical system. This paper approaches the problem by presenting an analysis of the notion of an elementary physical proposition. The notion is shown to be realized in standard formulations of the theory and to illuminate the significance of proofs of the impossibility of hidden variable extensions. In the interpretation of quantum mechanics that (...) emerges from this analysis, the philosophically distinctive features of the theory derive from the fact that it seeks to represent a reality of which complete knowledge is essentially unattainable. (shrink)

Arne Naess and Paul Taylor are two of the most forceful proponents of the principle of species equality. Problematically, both, when adjudicating conflict of interest cases, resort to employing explicit or implicit species-ranking arguments. I examine how Lawrence Johnson’s critical, species-ranking approach helpfully avoids the normative inconsistencies of “biospherical egalitarianism.” Many assume species-ranking schemes are rooted in arrogant, ontological claims about human, primate, or mammalian superiority. Species-ranking, I believe, is best viewed as a justified articulation of moral priorities in response (...) to individuals’ or entities’ relative ranges of vulnerability and need, rooted in their relative ranges of capacities and interests. (shrink)

Essential Buddhism, the fundamental teachings of the historical Buddha and the core of all major branches of Buddhism, is psychology, not religion or philosophy. Essential Buddhism is described from a psychological perspective and interrelated with Western psychology in general, and cognitive science, behaviour modification, psychoanalysis, and transpersonal psychology, in specific. Integrating Buddhist psychology and Western psychology yields a more comprehensive psychology and more powerful therapies.

Managing the Nanotechnology Revolution: Consider the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Criteria.................................................................................. 24..

In one of its versions, the principle of sufficient reason maintains that every true proposition has a sufficient reason for its truth. Recently, a number of philosophers have argued against the principle on the ground that there are propositions such as the conjunction of all truths that are ‘too big’ to have a sufficient reason. The task of this article is to show that such maximal propositions pose no threat to the principle. According to what is perhaps the most ‘popular’ (...) version of the principle to sufficient reason (PSR), every true proposition has a sufficient reason why it is true. Peter van Inwagen formulates the principle as follows: ‘for every truth, for everything that is so, there is a sufficient reason for its being true or being so.’ Like many contemporary philosophers, however, he rejects the principle. My purpose here is to show that the main philosophical argument against PSR rests on a mistaken assumption. There is also a ‘scientific’ argument against PSR that turns on considerations of quantum indeterminacy; but that argument lies beyond the scope of this discussion. (shrink)

This paper offers a sketch of the complicated conflicts which arise—and metastasize seemingly daily—in the era of Big Data. Given the public’s ubiquitous-yet-ostensibly-voluntary data surrender, and industry’s ubiquitous-yet-ostensibly-anodyne collection of the same, inaction is not an option for any near-just society. By revisiting the philosophical basis for Panoptic apparatus, sketching the tumultuous history of US contract law trying to protect the public from itself, and comparing existing industry codes for similarly-situated—read: terrifyingly invasive—fields, the paper will provide a preliminary framework for (...) identifying and confronting the galaxy of problems associated with data analytics. (shrink)

The momentum of advances in biology is evident in the history of patents on life forms. As we proceed forward with greater understanding and technological control of developmental biology there will be many new and challenging dilemmas related to patenting of human parts and partial trajectories of human development. These dilemmas are already evident in the current conflict over the moral status of the early human embryo. In this essay, recent evidence from embryological studies is considered and the unbroken continuity (...) of organismal development initiated at fertilization is asserted as clear and reasonable grounds for moral standing. Within this frame of analysis, it is proposed that through a technique of Altered Nuclear Transfer, non-organismal entities might be created from which embryonic stem cells could be morally procured. Criteria for patenting of such non-organismal entities are considered. (shrink)