In this case, it is noted that while DNA testing and methylation are being studied as biomarkers for high-grade squamous intraepithelial lesions in the anal canal, their efficacy is no...

What is the basis for arguing that a volunteer army exploits citizens who lack civilian career opportunities? How do we determine that a doctor who has sex with his patients is exploiting them? In this book, Alan Wertheimer seeks to identify when a transaction or relationship can be properly regarded as exploitative--and not oppressive, manipulative, or morally deficient in some other way--and explores the moral weight of taking unfair advantage. Among the first political philosophers to examine this important topic (...) from a non-Marxist perspective, Wertheimer writes about ordinary experience in an accessible yet philosophically penetrating way. He considers whether it is seriously wrong for a party to exploit another if the transaction is consensual and mutually advantageous, whether society can justifiably prohibit people from entering into such a transaction, and whether it is wrong to allow oneself to be exploited. Wertheimer first considers several contexts commonly characterized as exploitive, including surrogate motherhood, unconscionable contracts, the exploitation of student athletes, and sexual exploitation in psychotherapy. In a section outlining his theory of exploitation, he sets forth the criteria for a fair transaction and the point at which we can properly say that a party has consented. Whereas many discussions of exploitation have dealt primarily with cases in which one party harms or coerces another, Wertheimer's book focuses on what makes a mutually advantageous and consensual transaction exploitive and analyzes the moral and legal implications of such exploitation. (shrink)

Explores Russell's activities as a polemicist, agitator, educator, and popularizer and discusses the evolution of his moral philosophy and its application, including his final battle against American intervention in Vietnam.

''The problem of Transcendence is the problem of our time. " I Needless to say, Transcendence was a particularly lively i~sue when Karl Heim wrote these words in the mid-1930's. Within the province of philosophi cal theology and philosophy of religion, however, it is always the prob lem, as Gordon Kaufman has recently reminded us. 2Por the question concerning the nature and the reality of Transcendence has not only to do with self-transcendence, but with the being of Transcendence-Itself, that is (...) to say, with the nature and the reality of God as experienced and understood at any given time or place. Now there are those today who would claim that any further discus sion of the latter half of this proposition, namely,Transcendence-Itse1f or God, is worthless and quite beside the point. Such persons would claim that the particular logia represented by the theological sciences has collapsed by virtue of its object having disappeared. Indeed, when one surveys the contemporary scene in philosophy and theology, there is a good deal of evidence that this is the case':"" theology of late having be come something of a "spectacle," to use Pritz Buri's term. One of the reasons for this, we here contend, is that the richness and the diversity of the meaning of Transcendence has been lost. And even though we do not here intend to resolve the issue, neither do we assume that such an enqui ry is either impossible or irrelevant. (shrink)

Most of the time our quantifications generalise over a restricted domain. Thus in the last sentence, ‘most of the time’ is arguably not a generalisation over all times in the history of the universe but is restricted to a sub-group of times, those at which humans exist and utter quantified phrases and sentences, say. Indeed the example illustrates the point that quantificational phrases often carry an explicit restriction with them: ‘some people’, ‘all dogs’. Even then, context usually restricts to a (...) subdomain of the class specified by the count noun. Although teenagers like to have fun by being, they mistakenly think, overly literal— ‘Everyone is tired, let’s get to bed’: ‘everyone: you mean every person in the entire universe?’— competent language users have to be sensitive to context virtually all the time. But is it always the case that generalisation is over a restricted domain? On the face of it, to claim this is paradoxical. If we say. (shrink)

This volume analyzes authoritarian, reformist, Marxist and anarchist approaches to the environmental problem, exposing the relationships between environmental crises, economic structures and the role of the state.

Humour is a source of moral concern because some jokes contain both elements of immorality and funniness. This raises the question of whether jokes can be funny despite moral flaws and, more generally, how immorality affects funniness. One answer to this question is comic moralism; the position that immorality negatively affects funniness. Berys Gaut has given a merited-response argument in defence of comic moralism, but Noël Carroll has criticised this argument. In this paper, I defend Gaut's argument from Carroll's criticism. (...) Specifically, I argue that benign appraisal is a necessary condition for amusement, which is a commonly proposed claim across many disciplines. (shrink)

“Busyness” like many concepts trades on contrast. The most obvious contrast is with “real work” and ‘really working.” “Busy work” is usually pretend work; we try to look as though we are achieving something but all we are doing is shuffling the paper on our desks, polishing the inlet manifold rather than diagnosing the fault about to destroy the engine, marching our soldiers up to the top of the hill and marching them down again rather than engaging the enemy. All (...) the same, being “busy” is often said to be a good thing: the Puritan hymn writer Isaac Watts celebrated “the little busy bee” for improving the shining hour. For creatures other than the bee, busy may be a good thing to be but not usually the best thing: a midfield soccer player who is “busy” is useful, but a player of equal skill who is “economical” is better. My theme is that our attitude to “real work” is deeply ambiguous; on the one side, work is a curse, the labour to which we are doomed as a result of the Fall; its side-effect of enforcing upon us a necessary discipline and self-discipline is small consolation. On the other side, work is the expression of distinctive human powers and aspirations; work brings imagination into the world as well as drudgery. We imagine a world that does not exist but might, and then we set about creating it. The Fall was a happy Fall, and the need to labour was the first step in teaching the human species how to make the most of its potentialities. (shrink)

This paper argues against Oaksford and Chater's claim that logicist cognitive science is not possible. It suggests that there arguments against logicist cognitive science are too closely tied to the account of Pylyshyn and of Fodor, and that the correct way of thinking about logicist cognitive science is in a mental models framework.

Bridging the gap between the world of science and the realm of the spiritual, B. Alan Wallace introduces a natural theory of human consciousness that has its roots in contemporary physics and Buddhism. Wallace's "special theory of ontological relativity" suggests that mental phenomena are _conditioned_ by the brain, but do not _emerge_ from it. Rather, the entire natural world of mind and matter, subjects and objects, arises from a unitary dimension of reality that is more fundamental than these dualities, (...) as proposed by Wolfgang Pauli and Carl Jung. To test his hypothesis, Wallace employs the Buddhist meditative practice of _samatha_, refining one's attention and metacognition, to create a kind of telescope to examine the space of the mind. Drawing on the work of the physicist John Wheeler, he then proposes a more general theory in which the participatory nature of reality is envisioned as a self-excited circuit. In comparing these ideas to the Buddhist theory known as the Middle Way philosophy, Wallace explores further aspects of his "general theory of ontological relativity," which can be investigated by means of _vipasyana_, or insight, meditation. Wallace then focuses on the theme of symmetry in reference to quantum cosmology and the "problem of frozen time," relating these issues to the theory and practices of the Great Perfection school of Tibetan Buddhism. He concludes with a discussion of the general theme of complementarity as it relates to science and religion. The theories of relativity and quantum mechanics were major achievements in the physical sciences, and the theory of evolution has had an equally deep impact on the life sciences. However, rigorous scientific methods do not yet exist to observe mental phenomena, and naturalism has its limits for shedding light on the workings of the mind. A pioneer of modern consciousness research, Wallace offers a practical and revolutionary method for exploring the mind that combines the keenest insights of contemporary physicists and philosophers with the time-honored meditative traditions of Buddhism. (shrink)

Leo Strauss is perhaps the only important theorist of our time who sought to revive political philosophy as it was practiced by thinkers like Plato, Machiavelli, Hobbes and Montesquieu. His penetrating studies of the masters of both classical political philosophy and modern political thought have suggested that philosophical and political issues long thought dead and buried may be not only alive, but at the root of contemporary uncertainties and perplexities.

The Renaissance -- The Enlightenment -- The nineteenth century, rival versions -- The twentieth century, towards a new humanism -- Has humanism a future?

Every author has to expect that some reviewers will dislike his book, perhaps intensely. That is par for the course. But one might hope that even a scathingly negative review would be accurate in its summary of the book’s contents and principal arguments. Alas, Peter Saulson’s review1 of my book Beyond the Hoax: Science, Philosophy and Culture 2 fails to meet this minimum standard.

But let me not beat a dead horse: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. More interesting are the substantive philosophical and political issues raised in Professor Aronowitz's critique of my Afterword. Unfortunately, Aronowitz seems to have had difficulty in reading my plain words.

This affair has brought up an incredible number of issues, and I can't dream of addressing them all in 10 minutes, so let me start by circumscribing my talk. I don't want to belabor Social Text 's failings either before or after the publication of my parody: Social Text is not my enemy, nor is it my main intellectual target. I won't go here into the ethical issues related to the propriety of hoaxing. I won't address the obscurantist prose and (...) the uncritical celebrity-worship that have infected certain trendy sectors of the American academic humanities. I won't enter into technical issues of the philosophy of science. I won't discuss the social role of science and technology. Indeed, I want to emphasize that this affair is in my view not primarily about science -- though that was the excuse that I used in constructing my parody -- nor is it a disciplinary conflict between scientists and humanists, who are in fact represented on all sides of the debate. What I believe this debate. (shrink)

Alan Millar; V*—The Idea of Experience, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 96, Issue 1, 1 June 1996, Pages 75–90, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotel.

The essay provides a short outline of Berlin's career and an assessment of his contribution to pluralist and liberal thought. He was a British academic with a Russian cast of mind, and an inhabitant of the ivory tower who was very much at home in the diplomatic and political world. Similarly, he was neither a historian of ideas nor a political philosopher in the narrow sense usually understood in the modern academy. Rather, he engaged in a trans-historical conversation about the (...) human condition with such figures as Machiavelli, Herzen, Vico, and Herder. The Russian liberal understanding of the historical and cultural setting was, in his view, much superior to that of familiar figures such as John Stuart Mill, just as the nonliberal Machiavelli cast a particularly vivid light on the problems of a pluralist world view. (shrink)

The term 'episodic memory' refers to our memory for unique, personal experiences, that we can date at some point in our past - our first day at school, the day we got married. It has again become a topic of great importance and interest to psychologists, neuroscientists, and philosophers. How are such memories stored in the brain, why do certain memories disappear (especially those from early in childhood), what causes false memories (memories of events we erroneously believe have really taken (...) place)? Since Endel Tulving's classic book 'Episodic memory' (OUP, 1983) very few books have been published on this topic. In recent years however, many of the assumptions made about episodic memory have had to be reconsidered as a result of new techniques, which have allowed us a far deeper understanding of episodic memory. In 'Episodic memory: new directions in research' three of the worlds leading researchers in the topic of memory have brought together a stellar team of contributors from the fields of cognitive psychology, neuropsychology, and neuroscience, to present an account of what we now know about about this fundamentally important topic. The list of contributors includes, amongst others, Daniel Schacter, Richard Morris, Fareneh Vargha-Khadem, and Endel Tulving. The work presented within this book will have a profound effect on the direction that future research in this topic will take. (shrink)

The author is a Professor of Physics at New York University and Professor of Mathematics at University College London. His main research interests are in statistical mechanics and quantum field theory. He is co-author with Roberto Fern´andez and J¨.

In this thesis, I address the metaphysical question `What is humour?' and the ethical question `When is humour immoral?' Consulting a dictionary reveals a circle of definitions between `amusement', `funniness', and `humour'. So I split the metaphysical question `What is humour?' into three questions: `What is amusement?', `What is funniness?' and `What is humour?' By critically analysing then synthesising recent research in philosophy, psychology and linguistics, I give the following answers: x amuses y if and only if: y is in (...) a non-serious, non-threatened, non-goal-directed state. y simultaneously activates two incompatible interpretations of x via unsound logic. sufficiently increases the psychological arousal of y. x is funny if and only if x merits amusement. x is humour if and only if the function of x is to merit or elicit amusement. Similarly, I split the ethical question `When is humour immoral?' into three questions: `When is amusement immoral?', `How does immorality affect funniness?' and `When is humour immoral?' By using, and, I give the following answers: Amusement is immoral when the correct theory of normative ethics defines, or to be immoral. Immorality negatively affects funniness. Humour-types are not subject to moral evaluation. Humour-tokens are immoral when the correct theory of normative ethics defines them to be immoral. This thesis contributes to the knowledge of the subject in two ways. First, by critically analysing and synthesising recent inter-disciplinary research, provides a more precisely specified definition of amusement than that in the philosophical literature. Second, research on humour, across all disciplines, conflates the three closely related but distinct concepts of humour, amusement and funniness. By providing a linear sequence of definitions,, and avoid the conceptual confusions that commonly occur. (shrink)

This edited collection brings together keynote articles from the journal _Disability & Society_ to provide a comprehensive and though-provoking exploration of the place of technology in disabled people’s lives, documenting and analysing the growing impact of technology on disability and society over recent decades. The authors explore theoretical, empirical and moral dilemmas that arise with the changing relationship between technological change and the lives, aspirations and possibilities of disabled people. The volume is organised into three parts which consider early foundational (...) work connecting disability and technology; key empirical studies related to the optimum use of technologies for independence and inclusion; and new moral and social dynamics thrown up by technological developments for disabled people’s lives. (shrink)

The second half of the 19th Century saw a revolution in both European politics and philosophy. Philosophical fervour reflected political fervour. Five great critics dominated the European intellectual scene: Ludwig Feuerbach, Karl Marx, Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Friedrich Nietzsche. "Nineteenth-Century Philosophy" assesses the response of each of these leading figures to Hegelian philosophy - the dominant paradigm of the time - to the shifting political landscape of Europe and the United States, and also to the emerging critique of modernity (...) itself. Both individually and collectively, these thinkers succeeded in revolutionizing theology, philosophy, psychology, and politics. The period also saw the emergence of new schools of thought and new disciplinary thinking. The volume covers the birth of sociology and the social sciences, the development of French spiritualism, the beginning of American pragmatism, the rise of science and mathematics, and the maturation of hermeneutics and phenomenology. (shrink)