Anthropology diffracted : originary humanicity -- Just figures?: forensic clairvoyance, mathematics, and the language question -- Enumerating language : "The unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" -- Natural convers(at)ions : or, what if culture was really nature all along? -- (Con)founding "the human" : rethinking the incest taboo -- Culpability and the double-cross : Irigaray with Merleau-Ponty.

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 52, Issue 4, Page 500-531, Fall 2024.

For use in applied settings, the melioration model will need to incorporate changes in the shapes of local value functions over time, treat current value as a continuous function of time since previous choices, and take into account discounting of the effects of current behavior on future value. The policy implications of the model for regulating drugs are limited.

A provocative question has emerged since the Supreme Court of Canada’s decision on assisted dying: Should Canadians who request, and are granted, an assisted death be considered a legitimate source of transplantable organs? A related question is addressed in this paper: is controlled organ donation after assisted death (cDAD) more or less ethically-problematic than standard, controlled organ donation after circulatory determination of death (cDCDD)? Controversial, ethics-related dimensions of cDCD that are of relevance to this research question are explored, and morally-relevant (...) distinctions between cDAD and cDCD are identified. In addition, a set of morally-relevant advantages of one practice over the other is uncovered, and a few potential, theoretical issues specifically related to cDAD practice are articulated. Despite these concerns, the analysis suggests a counterintuitive conclusion: cDAD is, overall, less ethically-problematic than cDCDD. The former practice better respects the autonomy interests of the potential donor, and a claim regarding irreversibility of cessation of the donor’s circulatory function in the cDAD context can be supported. Further, with cDAD, there is no possibility that the donor will have negative sensory experiences during organ procurement surgery. Although the development of appropriate policy-decision and regulatory approaches in this domain will be complex and challenging, the comparative ethical analysis of these two organ donation practices has the potential to constructively inform the deliberations of relevant stakeholders, resource persons and decision makers. (shrink)

Since the global financial crisis in 2008, corporations have faced a crisis of trust, with growing sentiment against ‘elites and ‘big business’ and a feeling that ‘something ought to be done’ to re-establish public regard for corporations. Trust and trustworthiness are deeply moral significant. They provide the ‘glue or lubricant’ that begets reciprocity, decreases risk, secures dignity and respect, and safeguards against the subordination of the powerless to the powerful. However, in deciding how to restore trust, it is difficult to (...) determine precisely what should be done, by whom, and who will bear the cost, especially if any action involves a risk to overall market efficiency and corporate profitability. The paper explores whether corporations have a moral duty to be trustworthy, to bear the cost of being so and thus contribute to resolving the current crisis of trust. It also considers where the state and other social actors have strong reason to protect and enforce such moral rights, while acknowledging that other actors have similar obligations to be trustworthy. It outlines five ‘salient factors’ that trigger specific rights to trustworthiness and a concomitant duty on corporations to be trustworthy: market power, subordination (threat and intimidation), the absence of choice, the need to preserve systemic trust, and corporate political power which might undermine a state’s legitimacy. Absent these factors and corporations do not have a general duty to be trustworthy, since a responsible actor in fair market conditions should be able to choose between the costs and benefits of dealing with generally trustworthy corporations. (shrink)

It is often challenging for mental health‐care providers and health organizations to perform their various roles and to meet their varied obligations. In complex mental health‐care circumstances the concurrent application of relevant ethical principles and values often leads to the emergence of completing obligations that need to be carefully weighed and balanced in the making of care‐related decisions. Although some clinical circumstances, such as those potentially triggering the duty to warn, are adequately guided by existing rules based on legal precedents, (...) there is a gap in decision‐making support in other mental health‐care domains. This article proposes that a set of targeted, decision‐making approaches be developed to assist in the handling of specific, challenging circumstances. By way of illustration, two novel approaches are introduced; that is, choosing to work within a moral relational space of optimal therapeutic engagement (at the micro level of clinical practice), and the use of a health policy development approach that instantiates deliberative engagement (at the meso and macro levels of health organization). (shrink)

New materialisms argue for a more science-friendly humanities, ventilating questions about methodology and subject matter and the importance of the non-human. However, these new sites of attention - climate, biology, affect, geology, animals and objects - tend to leverage their difference against language and the discursive. Similarly, questions about ontology have come to eclipse, and even eschew, those of epistemology. While this collection of essays is in kinship with this radical shake-up of how and what we study, the aim is (...) to re-navigate what constitutes materiality. These efforts are encapsulated by a rewriting of the Derridean axiom, 'there is no outside text' as 'there is no outside nature.' What if nature has always been literate, numerate, social? And what happens to 'the human' if its exceptional identity and status is conceded quantum, non-local and ecological implication? (shrink)

This paper offers a targeted five-point critique of the current debate about the problem of basic equality. First, it argues that the debate should be refocussed away from any particular concept(ion) of basic equality to a more agnostic proposition about the possibility of establishing equality in any basic moral property. Second, it re-articulates the problem in terms of grounding relations rather than supervenience. Third, it argues that proponents of predominant approach to solving this problem have failed to properly distinguish between (...) two different non-scalar properties defined in terms of scalar properties: ‘range properties’ and ‘bare properties’. Once disambiguated it is clear as to why such an approach must fail. However, this critique does direct our attention to a possible alternative strategy, that is, grounding our equality upon a ‘relative property’. (shrink)

Bianchi, Stanley, and Sutander argue in an insightful, cogent manner for the consideration of harm reduction as an ethically-defensible, non-paternal management approach for capable persons...

The jurist A. V. Dicey’s study of the Law of the Constitution (1885) has been since its publication the dominant analysis of the British constitution and the source of orthodoxy on such subjects as parliamentary sovereignty and the rule of law. This canonical status has obscured the originality of Dicey’s ideas in the history of legal and political thought. Dicey reworked the traditional idea of sovereignty into two separate concepts – legal and political sovereignty – in order to square the (...) common law notion of the sovereignty of parliament with the democratic idea of the sovereignty of the people. He forged a new concept – ‘the rule of law’ – to explain the legal basis of liberty in common law countries in a manner that was both Benthamite and constitutionalist. Finally, he provided a democratic and anti-federalist rationale for maintaining the Union of Great Britain and Ireland. This majoritarian, centralist and utilitarian constitutionalism has been one of the most enduring products of Victorian scholarship. This article seeks to recover it in its original context and, in so doing, to show the value of reintegrating legal thought into the mainstream of modern British history and the history of political thought. (shrink)

Critical-care decision making is highly complex, given the need for health care providers and organizations to consider, and constructively respond to, the diverse interests and perspectives of a variety of legitimate stakeholders. Insights derived from an identified set of ethics-related considerations have the potential to meaningfully inform inclusive and deliberative policy development that aims to optimally balance the competing obligations that arise in this challenging, clinical decision-making domain. A potential, constructive outcome of such policy engagement is the collaborative development of (...) an as-fair-as-possible dispute resolution process that incorporates an appropriated-justified, defensible critical-care obligation threshold. (shrink)

This article explores Derrida's suggestion in Of Grammatology that deconstruction might be considered a positive science. The implication here is that ‘no outside of text’ does not evoke an enclosure whose limits can't be breached, an enclosure that discovers human exceptionalism in linguistic and technological capacities. Instead, this sense of a system and its involvements (différance) is already entangled in any ‘atom’ of its expression, whereby ‘no outside of text’ can be read as ‘no outside of Nature’. The logic that (...) informs and justifies the conventional separations between nature and culture, ideation and matter, and human and non-human, are thereby confounded; the dimensions of efficacy, as well as the vexed question of intention appear as non-local (systemic); and the very notion of language – what it is and how it works – is distributed in ways that give rise to the same quandaries that surround the quantum problematic. Indeed, at the end of this meditation the difference between the humanities and the sciences, especially in its current configuration as the impasse of ‘the two cultures’, can no longer be sustained. (shrink)

This book explores issues at the core of modern linguistics and cognitive science. Why are all languages similar in some ways and in others utterly different? Why do languages change and change variably? How did the human capacity for language evolve, and how far did it do so as an innate ability? Simon Kirby looks at these questions from a broad perspective, arguing that they can be studied together. The author begins by examining how far the universal properties of (...) language may be explained by examining the way it is used, and how far by the way it is structured. He then considers what insights may be gained by combining functional and formal approaches. In doing so he develops a way of treating language as an adaptive system, in which its communicative and formal roles are both crucial and complementary. In order to test the effectiveness of competing theories and explanations, Simon Kirby develops computational models to show what universals emerge given a particular theory of language use or acquisition. He presents here both the methodology and the results. Function, Selection, and Innateness is important for its argument, its methodology, and its conclusions. It is a powerful demonstration of the value of looking at language as an adaptive system and goes to the heart of current debates on the evolution and nature of language. (shrink)

Interest in the future, clinical implementation of uterus transplantation for uterine factor infertility was recently boosted by the demonstration of proof-of-concept for deceased uterus donation/transplantation. The ethical dimensions of living and deceased uterus transplantation are explored and addressed in the paper through their comparison to the ethical elements of an existing, legal, assisted reproduction practice in some high-income countries, i.e., gestational surrogacy. A set of six ethics lenses is used in the comparative analysis: reproductive autonomy and rights, informed choice/consent, relevant (...) critical relational theories, health equity, theoretical application of the accepted living donation standard, and comparative benefits and burdens considerations. Gestational surrogacy, as currently practiced in some high-income countries, is the assumed, theoretical base-threshold for determination of ethical acceptability in assisted reproduction practices. The analysis demonstrates that : 1) the ethical acceptability of living uterus donation/transplantation is less than that of gestational surrogacy in high-income countries, and 2) the ethical acceptability of deceased uterus donation/transplantation is roughly equivalent to that of gestational surrogacy. This leads to the conclusion that, at the present time, only one version of uterus transplantation practice, i.e., deceased uterus transplantation, should be considered ethically acceptable for possible clinical implementation in high-income countries. (shrink)

In calling for the transformation of military medical education and training, the 2005 Base Realignment and Closure Commission recommended relocating basic and specialty enlisted medical training to a single site to take advantage of economies of scale and the opportunity for joint training. As a result, a joint medical education and training campus (METC) has been established at Fort Sam Houston, Texas. Two of METC's primary long-term goals are to become a high-performing learning organization and to seek accreditation as a (...) community college. Such goals require a clear model of organizational improvement with well-defined metrics for measuring its performance and using research and evaluation to assess and improve that performance. Lessons learned from a review of practices at institutions with similar missions -- such as community colleges, corporate universities, the UK's Defence Medical Education and Training Agency, and other federal agencies, such as the Veterans Health Administration -- establish a clear need for an office of institutional research to help METC attain its organizational goals. They also provide useful recommendations regarding the METC office's structure, scope, and governance. (shrink)

" "Jeremy Kirby addresses a difficulty in Aristotle's metaphysics, namely the possibility that two organisms of the same species might share the same matter.

I argue for the use of the adjunction operator (adding a single new element to an existing set) as a basis for building a finitary set theory. It allows a simplified axiomatization for the first-order theory of hereditarily finite sets based on an induction schema and a rigorous characterization of the primitive recursive set functions. The latter leads to a primitive recursive presentation of arithmetical operations on finite sets.

A careful exposition of Zilber's quasiminimal excellent classes and their categoricity is given, leading to two new results: the L ω₁ ,ω (Q)-definability assumption may be dropped, and each class is determined by its model of dimension $\aleph _{0}$.

We show that Zilber’s conjecture that complex exponentiation is isomorphic to his pseudo-exponentiation follows from the a priori simpler conjecture that they are elementarily equivalent. An analysis of the first-order types in pseudo-exponentiation leads to a description of the elementary embeddings, and the result that pseudo-exponential fields are precisely the models of their common first-order theory which are atomic over exponential transcendence bases. We also show that the class of all pseudo-exponential fields is an example of a nonfinitary abstract elementary (...) class, answering a question of Kesälä and Baldwin. (shrink)

Overby and colleagues (2015) draw our critical attention to a variety of ethical challenges associated with the practice of controlled donation after circulatory determination of death (cDCDD). Alt...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Aristotle On MetaphorJohn T. KirbyMuch Madness is divinest Sense—To a discerning Eye——Emily DickinsonOurs is an age of metaphor. Wayne Booth, in his inimitable fashion, remarks,There were no conferences on metaphor, ever, in any culture, until our own century was already middle–aged. As late as 1927, John Middleton Murry, complaining about the superficiality of most discussions of metaphor, could say, "There are not many of them."... Explicit discussions of something (...) called metaphor have multiplied astronomically in the past fifty years.... students of metaphor have positively pullulated.1In the postmodern era philosophers of language, particularly those outside the analytic tradition, tend to think more and more in terms of all language as being metaphorical. This trend, however, is not a new one; it seems to have its roots back as far as Heraclitus, and, in the modern world, was certainly espoused by Giambattista Vico in his Nuova Scienza (1725). What we may call the Viconian tradition was embraced on the continent by Nietzsche, and, in the Anglo–American world, by Ivor Richards.2 Nietzsche's thought had far–reaching consequences in terms of its influence on the work of Paul de Man and Jacques Derrida, who in the late 1960s and the 1970s found themselves in the center of a vortex of controversy over the notion of "deconstruction," and its interrogation not only of Western metaphysics but also of human language and thought generally. Now, it seemed, such simple formulae as "This X is Y" called into question the whole process of naming and predication. But even among those for whom this is an unconvincing position, the problem of metaphor continues to be a fascinating one. How to define [End Page 517] it? What are its uses? What is its relation to literal, or nonfigured, language? And what its relation to human cognition?3Booth goes on to say, "there have been many more discussions of what people from the Greek philosophers on called metaphor than any bibliography could show."4 That being so, a sustained study of Aristotle's concept of metaphor needs no further justification, since it is to him that we owe the terms in which the debate was framed for many hundreds of years. Indeed, here as often, even those who wish to propose new or different parameters for the analysis of metaphor must do so against the grain of the Aristotelian tradition.5 This, if nothing else, is a measure of the tremendous influence Aristotle has had on the history of Western rhetoric and poetics.As on many other topics, it is now fashionable to condescend to Aristotle for the limitations of his study of metaphor, or—more aggressively still—to find fault with its parameters. Certainly he did not preempt any further discussion on the issue; nor, I imagine, would he have wanted to. But I surmise that there is more to be learned from an appreciative study of his methods here than one might initially suppose. In this study, then, after a few remarks on recent studies of metaphor, I propose to examine the state of the question before Aristotle, and then [End Page 518] to look at what he has to say about metaphor in the Poetics and Rhetoric.In their attempts to cope with the notion of language generally, and specifically with the questions of literal versus figurative language, scholars over the last hundred years or so have themselves appropriated a number of metaphors purporting to describe the phenomenon. These include (above all) models based on comparison and interaction. The comparison model, it is typically said, conforms more to the classical approach to metaphor, whereas those based on interaction stem primarily from the work of Richards and Black.6 Indeed it is from this notion of interaction that the terms "tenor" and "vehicle" were born, the former referring to the underlying idea that is illustrated or illuminated by the latter, which is "applied" to it; and Richards is right both to point out [1] that the word "metaphor" is sometimes used to signify what he means by "vehicle," and sometimes to mean the symbiosis resulting from the conjunction of tenor and vehicle, and [2] that... (shrink)

The editorial in the September 1982 issue of this journal and many articles before and since have addressed the problem of informed consent. Is it possible? Is it a useful concept? Is there anything new to be said about it? In this article the basic rationale of the rule (patient autonomy) is explained and the extent of the rule explored. Various exceptions have been offered by the law and an attempt is made to catalogue the chief of these. A number (...) of specially vulnerable groups are then identified, the most important, and vexed, being children. How can informed consent be secured in the case of young patients? Finally, a few problems are mentioned in an attempt to get this subject back to reality. The appeal to the principle primum non nocere may be medical paternalism in disguise. Informed consent is the competing principle that reminds us of the primacy of human autonomy. A pointer is given to the future: even the use of sound recordings to explain medical procedures and to activate informed consent so that it may become a reality and not just a lawyer's myth, should be considered. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hume Studies Volume 29, Number 2, November 2003, pp. 305-325 Hume, Sympathy, and the Theater BRIAN KIRBY Every movement of the theater, by a skillful poet, is communicated, as it were by magic, to the spectators; who weep, tremble, resent, rejoice, and are inflamed with all the variety of passions, which actuate the several personages of the drama. (EPM 5.2.26; SBN 221-2) Much has been written recently about (...) the role of sympathy in Hume's moral theory. That may indeed be its most important use. But it seems from a number of illustrations he uses that it has broader applications, in particular, application to a spectator's appreciation of drama. The problem some see with this broader application is that it conflicts with the basic definition of sympathy as a process by means of which impressions are shared. The actors on the stage would not seem to have the same passions which "inflame" the spectators. Worse, the spectators do not believe in their hearts that the passions which inflame them have real correlates. At first blush, "sympathy" might mean any one of several things. In "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn," for example, Jonathan Bennett says, "As for 'sympathy': I use this term to cover every sort of fellow-feeling, as when one feels pity over someone's loneliness, or horrified compassion over his pain, and when one feels a shrinking reluctance to act in a way which will bring misfortune to someone else."1 However, fellow-feeling is not a sharing of feelings in Hume's sense. Alvin I. Goldman comes closer to Hume's meaning in a narrow description of empathy: "To empathize with someone, in its Brian Kirby, Associate Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at St. Lawrence University, is at 172 Miner Street Road, Canton, NY 13617, USA. e-mail: [email protected] 306 Brian Kirby most frequent sense, is to sympathize or commiserate, which involves shared attitudes, sentiments, or emotions."2 Still, Hume's sympathy is not the commiseration but rather what is involved in the commiseration, the shared attitudes, sentiments, and emotions. "No quality of human nature," says Hume, "is more remarkable, both in itself and in its consequences, than that propensity we have to sympathize with others, and to receive by communication their inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own" (T 2.1.11.2; SBN 316). The principle of sympathy as he describes it in his technical sense is as follows: When any affection is infus'd by sympathy, it is at first known only by its effects, and by those external signs in the countenance and conversation, which convey an idea of it. This idea is presently converted into an impression, and acquires such a degree of force and vivacity, as to become the very passion itself, and produce an equal emotion, as any original affection. However instantaneous this change of the idea into an impression may be, it proceeds from certain views and reflections, which will not escape the strict scrutiny of a philosopher, tho' they may the person himself, who makes them. (T 2.1.11.3; SBN 317) If sympathy has to do with the sharing of impressions, what can one say about possible broader applications in which the correlate impression is absent? One tack to take is to dismiss the illustrative examples as aberrations or at least minor inconsistencies on Hume's part. A second is to argue that the broader applications follow reasonably, given Hume's description of the mechanism of sympathy. I propose, in this paper, to take the second tack. The above description characterizes what one might call sympathy in its normal social context in which the feelings of another are identifiable from his verbal and bodily behavior. Of course, the identification is not infallible. The other person may intend to deceive by lying or mimicking the behavior associated with a feeling. But such occasions are parasitic on normal contexts. But beyond the normal social context, there are other occasions which elicit sympathy, situations in which passions are aroused in the sympathizers for good cause, but which have no correspondent in the objects of sympathy. The case... (shrink)

It has become somewhat a commonplace in recent political philosophy to remark that all plausible political theories must share at least one fundamental premise, ‘that all humans are one another's equals’. One single concept of ‘basic equality’, therefore, is cast as the common touchstone of all contemporary political thought. This paper argues that this claim is false. Virtually all do indeed say that all humans are ‘equals’ in some basic sense. However, this is not the same sense. There are not (...) one but two concepts of basic equality, and they reflect not a grand unity within political philosophy but a deep and striking division. I call these concepts ‘Equal Worth’ and ‘Equal Authority’. The former means that each individual’s good is of equal moral worth. The latter means that no individual is under the natural authority of anyone else. Whilst these two predicates are not in themselves logically inconsistent, I demonstrate that they are inconsistent foundation stones for political theory. A theory that starts from Equal Worth will find it near impossible to justify Equal Authority. And a theory that starts from Equal Authority will find any fact about the true worth of things, including ourselves, irrelevant to justifying legitimate action. This helps us identify the origin of many of our deepest and seemingly intractable disagreements within political philosophy, and directs our attention to the need for a clear debate about the truth and/or relationship between the two concepts. In short, my call to arms can be summed up in the demand that political philosophers never again be allowed to claim ‘that all human beings are equals’ full stop. They must be clear in what dimension they claim that we are equals—Worth or Authority. (shrink)

In 1616, the Holy Congregation for the Index prohibited the printing and reading of Copernicus’s On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres on the grounds that heliocentrism contradicted the Holy Scriptures. According to Johannes Kepler, “To study the heavens is to know God as creator.” Moreover, “Since we astronomers are priests of the highest God in regard to the book of nature, it befits us to be thoughtful, not of the glory of our minds, but rather, above else, of the (...) glory of God.” There is some precedent for such claims in John Calvin’s conception of the creation as a “Theatre of God’s glory” with its corollary of the so-called “two books”. Kepler’s defence of Copernican heliocentrism relies upon the distinction between the Book of Nature from the Book of Scripture. Building upon the soteriological foundations laid by Martin Luther, Kepler the astronomer-theologian also seeks to sharpen the distinction between a “visible” and an “invisible” heaven, with significant consequences for astronomical physics. The new astronomy is profoundly implicated in sixteenth-century theological controversies. (shrink)

Words refer to objects in the world, but this correspondence is not one-to-one: Each word has a range of referents that share features on some dimensions but differ on others. This property of language is called underspecification. Parts of the lexicon have characteristic patterns of underspecification; for example, artifact nouns tend to specify shape, but not color, whereas substance nouns specify material but not shape. These regularities in the lexicon enable learners to generalize new words appropriately. How does the lexicon (...) come to have these helpful regularities? We test the hypothesis that systematic backgrounding of some dimensions during learning and use causes language to gradually change, over repeated episodes of transmission, to produce a lexicon with strong patterns of underspecification across these less salient dimensions. This offers a cultural evolutionary mechanism linking individual word learning and generalization to the origin of regularities in the lexicon that help learners generalize words appropriately. (shrink)

This essay will examine scholarly attempts at distilling a proto-ethical philosophy from the Daoist classic known as the Zhuangzi. In opposition to interpretations of the text which characterize it as amoralistic, I will identify elements of a natural normativity in the Zhuangzi. My examination features passages from the Zhuangzi – commonly known as the “knack” passages – which are often interpreted through some sort of linguistic, skeptical, or relativistic lens. Contra such readings, I believe the Zhuangzi prescribes an art of (...) living – or shù [術] – which incorporates a few motifs familiar to certain threads of philosophical naturalism. Building on existing scholarship which treats of the praxeology of the text, I argue that the naturalist themes present in the Zhuangzi support an unusual, but robust, view of moral expertise. (shrink)

When you think of compassion, what comes to mind? Kindness, understanding, tenderness, empathy, maybe warmth? Compassion can be all those things - but it is much more. Drawing on his many years of experience as a clinical psychologist and researcher, Dr James Kirby brings together hard science and real-life examples to offer a guide to a more compassionate life and society. Kirby debunks the myth that compassion is simple a feeling and shows us how it is a motivational (...) force that can shape our behaviour and relationships with each other and the world. He considers how it might help with self-criticism, parenting and grief, and he explores what part artificial intelligence might play in a compassionate future. In this engaging and timely book, Kirby traverses philosophy, psychology and pop culture to show how we can choose compassion to make our lives healthier, happier and more meaningful. (shrink)

The productivity of language is subserved by two structural properties: language is recursive, which allows the creation of an infinite number of utterances, and language is compositional, which makes the interpretation of novel utterances possible. A potential explanation for the linkage between the functional properties of compositionality and the compositional structure of language is that this fit arose through cultural, rather than biological, evolution. In order to argue that the compositional structure of language is a product of cultural evolution, it (...) is assumed that language is compositional, socially learned, and therefore culturally transmitted. A well-established solution to the problem of linkage in biological systems is that of evolution by natural selection: adaptation. Compositionality can be explained as a cultural adaptation by language to the problem of transmission through a learning bottleneck. (shrink)