(1996). The contribution of communist states to the proscription of racist speech. The European Legacy: Vol. 1, Fourth International Conference of the International Society for the study of European Ideas, pp. 801-811.

The COVID-19 pandemic has upended in-person public education across the United States, a critical infrastructure of care that parents—especially mothers—depend on to work. To understand the nature and magnitude of school closures across states, we collected detailed primary data—the Elementary School Operating Status database —to measure the percentage of school districts offering in-person, remote, and hybrid instruction models for elementary schools by state in September 2020. We link these data to the Current Population Survey to evaluate the association between school (...) reopening and parents’ labor force participation rates, comparing 2020 labor force participation rates to those observed prepandemic in 2019. We find that, across states, the maternal labor force participation rate fell to a greater extent than that of fathers. In 2019, mothers’ rate of labor force participation was about 18 percentage points lower than fathers’. By 2020, this gap grew by 5 percentage points in states where schools offered primarily remote instruction. We show that schools are a vital source of care for young children, and that without in-person instruction, mothers have been sidelined from the labor force. The longer these conditions remain in place, the more difficult it may be for mothers to fully recover from prolonged spells of nonemployment, resulting in reduced occupational opportunities and lifetime earnings. (shrink)

Disney's computer‐animated musical film, Moana tells the tale of Moana, the daughter of Tui, the chief of a Polynesian island, Motunui. Bound by the legendary tradition of her ancestors, Moana is expected to follow her lineage and take over as chief when she grows up. As the authors dig beneath the surface level of the story, they find a metaphorical and philosophical level to Moana's journey. The story of Moana has layers. First, it is literally a tale of Moana's voyage (...) outside beyond the reef so that she can restore the heart of Te Fiti and save the people of Motunui. She closes this tale with a happy ending as she simultaneously lives the life that she freely chooses, becomes the leader of her people (by saving them) as her parents wanted, and honors her tradition insofar as she restores her ancestors' tradition of wayfinding. (shrink)

The moral nature of humanity has been debated and discussed by philosophers, theologians, and others for centuries. Only recently have neuroscientists and neuropsychologists joined the conversation by publishing a number of studies using newer brain scanning techniques directed at regions of the brain related to social behavior. Is it possible to relate particular brain structures and functions to the behavior of people, deemed evil, who violate all the tenets of proper behavior laid down by ancient and holy texts, prohibiting lying, (...) cheating, stealing, and murder? Is it possible that the recently discovered “mirror neurons” in the brain are the basis for empathy and that deficits in these brain cells lead to severe difficulty in relating socially to other people, including parents and siblings? What do we make of reports that the fusiform face area in the temporal lobe of the brain is specialized for the perception of faces and that defects in this region are seen regularly in individuals who are psychopathic. (shrink)

In this essay I advance major criticisms of recent work on the concept of liberty by, Among others, I berlin, G maccallum, H j mccluskey, S I benn, And f oppenheim. Emerging from these critical analyses is a new definition of 'liberty, In the spirit of negative liberalism', Which differentiates it from the related but distinct goods of human autonomy, Opportunity, Ability, Power, And self-Development.

Background: The factors influencing parents’ willingness to enroll their children in biobanks are poorly understood. This study sought to assess parents’ willingness to enroll their children, and their perceived benefits, concerns, and information needs under different consent and data-sharing scenarios, and to identify factors associated with willingness. Methods: This large, experimental survey of patients at the 11 eMERGE Network sites used a disproportionate stratified sampling scheme to enrich the sample with historically underrepresented groups. Participants were randomized to receive one of (...) three consent and data-sharing scenarios. Results: In total, 90,000 surveys were mailed and 13,000 individuals responded (15.8% response rate). 5737 respondents were parents of minor children. Overall, 55% (95% confidence interval 50–59%) of parents were willing to enroll their youngest minor child in a hypothetical biobank; willingness did not differ between consent and data-sharing scenarios. Lower educational attainment, higher religiosity, lower trust, worries about privacy, and attitudes about benefits, concerns, and information needs were independently associated with less willingness to allow their child to participate. Of parents who were willing to participate themselves, 25% were not willing to allow their child to participate. Being willing to participate but not willing to allow one’s child to participate was independently associated with multiple factors, including race, lower educational attainment, lower annual household income, public health care insurance, and higher religiosity. Conclusions: Fifty-five percent of parents were willing to allow their youngest minor child to participate in a hypothetical biobank. Building trust, protecting privacy, and addressing attitudes may increase enrollment and diversity in pediatric biobanks. (shrink)

The Doctrine of Double Effect (DDE) is an influential non-consequentialist principle positing a role for intention in affecting the moral permissibility of some actions. In particular, the DDE focuses on the intend/foresee distinction, the core claim being that it is sometimes permissible to bring about as a foreseen but unintended side-effect of one’s action some harm it would have been impermissible to aim at as a means or as an end, all else being equal. This article explores the meaning and (...) application of the DDE along with current debates over the nature of the intend/foresee distinction and its moral significance. How is the line between intended effects and merely foreseen but unintended side-effects to be drawn, and how are problem cases best handled? What is an appropriate methodology for debating the tenability of the DDE? How might the DDE interact with other non-consequentialist principles, and how might it be modified to capture other related factors (resulting perhaps in a Doctrine of Triple Effect) or to avoid certain problem cases? Does the DDE make permissibility turn on the actual intentions of particular agents, as critics such as Thomson and Scanlon assume, or is the role of intention more abstract? (shrink)

This paper argues that we ought to conceive of the Dark Energy problem—the question of how to account for observational data, naturally interpreted as accelerated expansion of the universe—as a crisis of underdetermined pursuit-worthiness. Not only are the various approaches to the Dark Energy problem evidentially underdetermined; at present, no compelling reasons single out any of them as more likely to be true than the other. More vexingly for working scientists, none of the approaches stands out as uncontroversially preferable over (...) its rivals in terms of its rationally warranted promise, i.e. the reasons to further work on, explore, and develop it. We demonstrate this claim by applying a Peircean economic model of pursuit-worthiness in terms of a cognitive cost/benefit estimate—with the instantiation of theory virtues as key indicators of cognitive gains—to the four main Dark Energy proposals (the cosmological constant approach, modified gravity, quintessence, and inhomogeneous cosmologies). According to our analysis, these approaches do not admit of an unambiguous, or uncontroversial, ranking with respect to which ansatz deserves distinguished attention and research efforts. The overall methodological counsel that our analysis underwrites recommends a pragmatic double research strategy forward: to encourage and foster theory pluralism and the search for tests—with the goal of enhancing the testability of the \(\Lambda \) CDM model and “testing it to destruction". (shrink)

Ford’s Helen Keller Was Never in a Chinese Room claims that my argument in How Helen Keller Used Syntactic Semantics to Escape from a Chinese Room fails because Searle and I use the terms ‘syntax’ and ‘semantics’ differently, hence are at cross purposes. Ford has misunderstood me; this reply clarifies my theory.

This project continues our interdisciplinary research into computational and cognitive aspects of narrative comprehension. Our ultimate goal is the development of a computational theory of how humans understand narrative texts. The theory will be informed by joint research from the viewpoints of linguistics, cognitive psychology, the study of language acquisition, literary theory, geography, philosophy, and artificial intelligence. The linguists, literary theorists, and geographers in our group are developing theories of narrative language and spatial understanding that are being tested by the (...) cognitive psychologists and language researchers in our group, and a computational model of a reader of narrative text is being developed by the AI researchers, based in part on these theories and results and in part on research on knowledge representation and reasoning. This proposal describes the knowledge-representation and natural-language-processing issues involved in the computational implementation of the theory; discusses a contrast between communicative and narrative uses of language and of the relation of the narrative text to the story world it describes; investigates linguistic, literary, and hermeneutic dimensions of our research; presents a computational investigation of subjective sentences and reference in narrative; studies children’s acquisition of the ability to take third-person perspective in their own storytelling; describes the psychological validation of various linguistic devices; and examines how readers develop an understanding of the geographical space of a story. This report is a longer version of a project description submitted to NSF. This document, produced in May 2007, is a L ATEX version of Technical Report 89-07 (Buffalo: SUNY Buffalo Department of Computer Science, August 1989), with slightly.. (shrink)

I advocate a theory of syntactic semantics as a way of understanding how computers can think (and how the Chinese-Room-Argument objection to the Turing Test can be overcome): (1) Semantics, considered as the study of relations between symbols and meanings, can be turned into syntax – a study of relations among symbols (including meanings) – and hence syntax (i.e., symbol manipulation) can suffice for the semantical enterprise (contra Searle). (2) Semantics, considered as the process of understanding one domain (by modeling (...) it) in terms of another, can be viewed recursively: The base case of semantic understanding –understanding a domain in terms of itself – is syntactic understanding. (3) An internal (or narrow ), first-person point of view makes an external (or wide ), third-person point of view otiose for purposes of understanding cognition. (shrink)

We believe that clinical ethics consultants (CECs) should offer advice, options, and recommendations to attending physicians and their teams. In their article in this issue of The Journal of Clinical Ethics, however, Kornfeld and Prager give CECs a somewhat different role. The CEC they describe may at times be more aptly understood as a medical interventionist who appropriates the roles of the attending physician and the medical team than as a traditional CEC. In these remarks, we distinguish the role of (...) the CEC from that of the physician, in contrast to some of these authors’ recommendations, which confuse the two roles. (shrink)

The increasing role played by medical ethicists in the clinical setting both as teachers and consultants has brought with it a demand for new methodologies that speak more precisely to the multiple problems encountered in actual attempts at case resolution. Some of these moves have to do with a revival of the truly classic case study approach to ethics, casuistry. This approach is anchored in the revelatory text of Jonsen and Toulmin, TheAbuseofCasuistry. A fine example of this methodology is an (...) article in TheJournalofClinicalEthics, Conjoined to this approach is a renewed interest in virtue ethics. The groundwork for this was laid by MacIntyre's masterful history of its demise in AfterVirtue. A clear and concise application of this ancient but always new approach is given in Pellegrino and Thomasma's book TheVirtuesinMedicalPractice. This way of doing ethics is particularly congenial to the practice of healthcare ethics in that it understands that virtue is just a rather fancy name for a good habit or skill. Since the practice of clinical medicine is quintessentially the learning and application of a range of often highly complex patterns of professional abilities and skills, a virtue ethics approach will allow for the concomitant development of a whole set of ethical skills. But both casuistry and virtue ethics may well be seen to be operative in a larger context now known as narrative ethics. (shrink)

A brief introduction to Meinong, his theory of objects, and modern interpretations of it. Sections include: The Theory of Objects, Castañeda's Theory of Guises, Parsons,'s Theory of Nonexistent Objects, Rapaport's Theory of Meinongian Objects, Routley's Theory of Items.

The claim that glycogen contains protein was first made exactly 100 years ago and has been the subject of contention ever since. It has now been established that rabbit‐muscle glycogen contains a covalently bound protein of Mr 37,000, present in equimolar proportion to glycogen. The protein, named glycogenin, is joined to muscle glycogen via a novel linkage involving the hydroxyl group of tyrosine, a fact of possible significance in the light of insulin's message being transmitted by tyrosine phosphorylation. The protein (...) is seen as the biogenetic precursor of glycogen. Its existence suggests an additional mode of regulation of glycogen metabolism since the amount, turnover and cellular location of glycogenin will influence the corresponding parameters for glycogen. A protein “primer” is suggested for the biogenesis of storage polysaccharides in general. (shrink)

The idea of role‐playing makes some people nervous – even some people who play role‐playing games (RPGs). So the idea of immersion is central to understanding how Dungeons Dragons and other aspects of participatory culture work. Phenomenology is a kind of “philosophy of mind” associated with the works of twentieth‐century philosophers Edmund Husserl, Martin Heidegger, Jean‐Paul Sartre, and Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, among others. The domain of phenomenology encompasses the entire range of experiences in the world, paying attention to what Husserl called (...) “intentionality,” or how our consciousness is directed toward particular objects in the world. The fact that this is presented as an atypical approach to play, or at least one that requires some effort, invites us to ask about typical modes of play if visualization of in‐game events is not that mode. This chapter concluded by scratch the surface of a complete phenomenological description of role‐playing. (shrink)

My interest is to examine the nature of mind in relation to value, for I suspect that the neglect by the psychologist of the true status of value has deterred his work in two respects: first, that it has prevented a genuine theory of mind's being arrived at, and secondly that it has prevented him in his clinical work from achieving for the individual the fuller expression of mind or self that makes for satisfaction or happiness.

This functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging study investigated high and low suggestible people responding to two visual hallucination suggestions with and without a hypnotic induction. Participants in the study were asked to see color while looking at a grey image, and to see shades of grey while looking at a color image. High suggestible participants reported successful alterations in color perception in both tasks, both in and out of hypnosis, and showed a small benefit if hypnosis was induced. Low suggestible people (...) could not perform the tasks successfully with or without the hypnotic induction. The fMRI results supported the self report data, and changes in brain activity were found in a number of visual areas. The results indicate that a hypnotic induction, although having the potential to enhance the ability of high suggestible people, is not necessary for the effective alteration of color perception by suggestion. (shrink)

A critical study of John Searle's Minds, Brains and Science (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

The philosophy of religion as a distinct discipline is an innovation of the last two hundred years, but its central topics--the existence and nature of the divine, humankind's relation to it, the nature of religion and its place in human life--have been with us since the inception of philosophy. Philosophers have long critically examined the truth of (and rational justification for) religious claims, and have explored such philosophically interesting phenomena as faith, religious experience and the distinctive features of religious discourse. (...) The second half of the twentieth-century has been an especially fruitful period, with philosophers using new developments in logic and epistemology to mount both sophisticated defenses of, and attacks on, religious claims. The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Religion contains newly commissioned chapters by 21 prominent experts who cover the field in a comprehensive but accessible manner. Each chapter is expository, critical, and representative of a distinctive viewpoint. The Handbook is divided into two sections. The first, "Problems," covers the most frequently discussed topics, among them arguments for God's existence, the problem of evil, and religious epistemology. The second is called "Approaches" and contains four essays assessing the advantages and disadvantages of different methods of practicing philosophy of religion. The Handbook offers contributors of high stature who present substantive and in-depth treatment of the most central topics. It is a must-have reference for anyone with an interest in philosophy and religion. (shrink)

This article argues that theism entails a species of pantheism on the grounds that there is simply no discernible difference between the God's knowledge of the world and the world that God knows. The case against this thesis begins with the traditional theory of distinctions. But since God is necessarily omniscient there is not even the possibility that these might be considered apart and thus distinguished in that way. But neither is it possible to do this by means of Leibnitz's (...) law, that is, by finding some feature possessed by the one but not the other. Three potential areas of difference are considered but rejected, first, that knowledge unlike the world is representational, and second, that knowledge unlike the world is phenomenal – there is something that it is like to have. Both of these features, though able to distinguish ordinary knowledge from its objects, cease to provide the difference we require when extended to the case of divine knowledge. A final area of potential difference lies in the transcendent nature of God over the world, especially with respect to time, finitude and possibility. But this, in the end, is found no more able to distinguish God's knowledge from its object than the previous two suggestions. (shrink)

This article explores atheist meaning-making by employing a multidimensional model of meaning operationalized by the Sources of Meaning and Meaning in Life Questionnaire. When compared to a representative sample of “religionists” and “nones”, atheists show lower degrees of meaningfulness, but they do not suffer from crises of meaning more frequently. However, subsequent cluster analysis reveals that heterogeneity within atheism has to be taken into account. Three types of atheists are identified. ‘Low-commitment’ atheists are characterised by generally low commitment; they report (...) very low meaningfulness and a high frequency of crises of meaning. ‘Broad-commitment’ atheists exhibit considerably higher levels of meaningfulness and rare crises of meaning. They evidence, in particular, high scores on the dimension of well-being and relatedness. The third type, primarily committed to “selfactualization,” exhibits moderate levels of meaningfulness, with crises of meaning being literally absent. Common to most atheists is a particular commitment to self-knowledge, freedom, knowledge, individualism, and comfort. In comparing male and female atheists, gendered patterns of commitment are discovered. (shrink)

I argue that it was not Plato's intention in his Socratic dialogues to provide a biography of Socrates. Rather, his intention was to describe and defend the philosophical life against its critics. The Socratic dialogues are "unhappy encounters" between Socrates, defender of the life of philosophy, and those who do not comprehend or who reject that life.

According to Jonathan Edwards, “consciousness and being are the same thing exactly.” “Nothing has any existence anywhere else…but either in created or uncreated consciousness”. The physical world, therefore, has no independent reality. “…the existence of all corporeal things is only ideas”. “The material universe exists only in the mind,” i.e., “it is absolutely dependent on the conception of the mind for its existence, and does not exist as spirits do…”. More accurately, “The substance of all bodies is the infinitely exact (...) and precise and perfectly stable idea in God’s mind together with His stable will that the same shall gradually be communicated to us and to other minds according to certain fixed and exact established methods and laws…”. (shrink)

The author uses a series of examples to illustrate two versions of a new, nonprobabilist principle of epistemic rationality, the special and general versions of the metacognitive, expected relative frequency principle. These are used to explain the rationality of revisions to an agent’s degrees of confidence in propositions based on evidence of the reliability or unreliability of the cognitive processes responsible for them—especially reductions in confidence assignments to propositions antecedently regarded as certain—including certainty-reductions to instances of the law of excluded (...) middle or the law of noncontradiction in logic or certainty-reductions to the certainties of probabilist epistemology. The author proposes special and general versions of the MERF principle and uses them to explain the examples, including the reasoning that would lead to thoroughgoing fallibilism—that is, to a state of being certain of nothing. The author responds to the main defenses of probabilism: Dutch Book arguments, Joyce’s potential accuracy defense, and the potential calibration defenses of Shimony and van Fraassen by showing that, even though they do not satisfy the probability axioms, degrees of belief that satisfy the MERF principle minimize expected inaccuracy in Joyce’s sense; they can be externally calibrated in Shimony and van Fraassen’s sense; and they can serve as a basis for rational betting, unlike probabilist degrees of belief, which, in many cases, human beings have no rational way of ascertaining. The author also uses the MERF principle to subsume the various epistemic akrasia principles in the literature. Finally, the author responds to Titelbaum’s argument that epistemic akrasia principles require that we be certain of some epistemological beliefs, if we are rational. (shrink)

This article offers proposed guidelines intended to protect the public interest in relationship to the advocated social responsibilities of successful entrepreneurs. The author argues that the most effective approach, then, is not preaching about obligations but, rather, establishing financial incentives for doing well by doing good. One example is the U.S. patent system. Another is a redesigned tax system that uses imposts to make socially damaging activities expensive, while reducing the financial burden on virtuous behavior.

Among the traditional list of divine attributes it is commonly said that God is a person. Making a distinction between being a person and having a personality, it is argued that God cannot be a person because it makes no sense to think of him as having a personality. Problems with the notion of divine personality are considered stemming from God’s perfection, his infinity, his omniscience, his rationality, his morally good nature and his gender neutrality. Three generic types of response (...) to these problems are considered, but each is found wanting. It is concluded that the problems with personality apply as much to the human case as to the divine. (shrink)

In this paper I argue against the view of G.E.L. Owen that the second version of the Third Man Argument is a sound objection to Plato's conception of Forms as paradigms and that Plato knew it. The argument can be formulated so as to be valid, but Plato need not be committed to one of its premises. Forms are self-predicative, but the ground of self-predication is not the same as that of ordinary predication.

Is sociology inherently a mode of secular materialism? Or, are there intellectual resources deep within the sociological tradition, expansively conceived, that offer the sociological imagination a spiritual `post-secular' perspective on society and culture? This article draws out the subterranean theological stream of sociological consciousness and illuminates a `sacramentalist' socio-theology with particular reference to the `iconic vision' of Paul Evdokimov. In the context of late modernity, such a radical emphasis on the sacred foundations and transcendent potentialities of life provides the possibility (...) of a fundamental critique of commodified profane culture and of sociology itself. (shrink)