“Opt-out” organ procurement policies based on presumed consent are typically advertised as being superior to “opt-in” policies based on explicit consent at securing organs for transplantation. However, Michael Gill has argued that presumed consent policies are also better than opt-in policies at respecting patient autonomy. According to Gill’s Fewer Mistakes Argument, we ought to implement the procurement policy that results in the fewest frustrated wishes regarding organ donation. Given that the majority of Americans wish to donate their organs, it is (...) plausible that a presumed consent policy would result in fewer frustrated wishes compared to the current opt-in policy. It follows that we ought to implement a policy of presumed consent. In this paper, I first consider and find wanting an objection to the Fewer Mistakes Argument developed recently by Douglas MacKay. I also consider an objection put forth by James Taylor but argue that there is a methodological reason to prefer my own argument to Taylor’s. Finally, I argue for two theses: first, that Gill’s major argument in favor of the crucial premise of the Fewer Mistakes Argument is flawed, and second, that the major premise of the Fewer Mistakes Argument is false. (shrink)

Book Review: P.P. Tolochko. Ukraine between Russia and the West: Historical and Nonfiction Essays. Saint Petersburg: Saint Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences, 2018. - 592 pp. ISBN 978-5-7621-0973-4This author discusses the problem of scientific objectivity and reviews a book written by the medievalist-historian P.P. Tolochko, full member of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, honorable director of the NASU Institute of Archaeology. The book was published by the Saint Petersburg University of Humanities and Social Sciences in the (...) autumn of 2018. The book presents a collection of articles and reports devoted to processes in Ukraine and, first of all, in Ukrainian historical science, which, at the moment, is experiencing an era of serious reformation of its interpretative models. The author of the book shows that these models are being reformed to suit the requirements of the new ideology, with an obvious disregard for the conduct of objective scientific research. In this regard, the problem of objectivity of scientific research becomes the subject of this review because the requirement of objectivity can be viewed not only as a methodological requirement but also as a moral and political position, opposing the rigor of scientific research to the impact of ideological, political and moral systems and judgments. It is concluded that in this sense the position of P.P. Tolochko can be considered as the act of profound ethical choice. (shrink)

This paper shows that the history of clinical medicine in the eighteenth century supports Paul Hoyningen-Huene’s thesis that there is a correlation between science and systematicity. For example, James Jurin’s assessment of the safety of variolation as a protection against smallpox adopted a systematic approach to the assessment of interventions in order to eliminate sources of cognitive bias that would compromise inquiry. Clinical medicine thereby became a science. I use this confirming instance to motivate a broader hypothesis, that systematicity is (...) a distinctive feature of science because systematicity is required by processes of knowledge generation that go beyond our everyday cognitive capacities, and these processes are required to produce knowledge of the kinds that science aims at. (shrink)

The percentage of female entrepreneurs is far below the level of males, although it has increased over the past several years. Based on the theory of planned behavior, the purpose of this article is to specify a model in which the relationship among entrepreneurial potential, gender and entrepreneurial intention are explored, by analyzing how perceived behavioral control (PBC) and perceived entrepreneurial skills, as exogenous variables, affect expression of intention for business, and how these are mediated by their entrepreneurial motivations and (...) risk taking propensity. Control variables where also included in this model, such as necessity-driven motives for business, in order to observe whether these are an influential factor. An implementation of Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to analyze data collected from 677 students. Variables within the model were compared by gender using t-Test, and all multivariate analysis were done by each one separately as well in order to better gauge their perceptions. Results showed that mean differences between males and females are not abundant, and come only from intentions, PBC and subjective norm, which are higher in males; and motives for business higher in females. Multivariate analysis shows gender differences at the mediation level and that necessity-driven motives are an influencing factor, more so in males, and it hampers the significance of subjective norm. Finally, the theoretical and practical implications of the results within the framework of entrepreneurship in Spain and future alternatives to improve the entrepreneurial potential are discussed. (shrink)

Peter Lipton argues that inference to the best explanation involves the selection of a hypothesis on the basis of its loveliness. I argue that in optimal cases of IBE we may be able to eliminate all but one of the hypotheses. In such cases we have a form of eliminative induction takes place, which I call ‘Holmesian inference’. I argue that Lipton’s example in which Ignaz Semmelweis identified a cause of puerperal fever better illustrates Holmesian inference than Liptonian IBE. I (...) consider in detail the conditions under which Holmesian inference is possible and conclude by considering the epistemological relations between Holmesian inference and Liptonian IBE.Keywords: Inference to the best explanation; Peter Lipton; Abduction; Holmesian inference; Eliminative induction. (shrink)

A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Specific papers deal with naturalistic epistemology, the limits of reductionism, the biological justification of ethics, the so-called 'trolley problem' in (...) moral philosophy, the political philosophy of biological endowments, and the Human Genome Project and its implications for policy. Rosenberg's important writings on a variety of issues are here organized into a coherent philosophical framework which promises to be a significant and controversial contribution to scholarship in many areas. (shrink)

In this volume his object is to fully examine his friend's writings and characters and draws upon his own personal recollections to do so.

There is a growing body of literature on whether or not online hate speech, or cyberhate, might be special compared to offline hate speech. This article aims to both critique and augment that literature by emphasising a distinctive feature of the Internet and of cyberhate that, unlike other features, such as ease of access, size of audience, and anonymity, is often overlooked: namely, instantaneousness. This article also asks whether there is anything special about online (as compared to offline) hate speech (...) that might warrant governments and intergovernmental organisations contracting out, so to speak, the responsibility for tackling online hate speech to the very Internet companies which provide the websites and services that hate speakers utilise. (shrink)

This essay aims to articulate why the Orthodox have historically, and to the present, opposed cremation. Its primary line of argument is that inhumation is a site of “theophanic encounter”: a manifestation of the Glory of God. This theophanic quality is borne out in the scriptures and the Church’s liturgical experience. In particular, the connections between the funeral service and the entombed Christ on Holy Friday and Saturday properly situate the meaning of the post-mortem body. This intimate connection between the (...) deceased and their body is clear in Orthodoxy’s “hylomorphism,” the soul-body unity, which champions the eschatology of resurrection. Finally, all of the above is concretely experienced in the cult of the saints and their relics, which become vehicles for the divine energies: a theophany of Christ’s ongoing conquest of sin and death. Thus, cremation can only be viewed as a tragic misunderstanding of the dual meaning of “doxa” in Orthodoxy: right-belief and right-glory. (shrink)

Experimental philosophy has emerged as a very specific kind of response to an equally specific way of thinking about philosophy, one typically associated with philosophical analysis and according to which philosophical claims are measured, at least in part, by our intuitions. Since experimental philosophy has emerged as a response to this way of thinking about philosophy, its philosophical significance depends, in no small part, on how significant the practice of appealing to intuitions is to philosophy. In this paper, I defend (...) the significance of experimental philosophy by defending the significance of intuitions—in particular, by defending their significance from a recent challenge advanced by Timothy Williamson. (shrink)

Let us call a property that is essentially dispositional a potency.1 David Armstrong thinks that potencies do not exist. All sparse properties are essentially categorical, where sparse properties are the explanatory properties of the type science seeks to discover. An alternative view, but not the only one, is that all sparse properties are potencies or supervene upon them. In this paper I shall consider the differences between these views, in particular the objections Armstrong raises against potencies.

У статті розглянуто результати археологічного дослідження трипільського храмового комплексу – Небелівського храму. Автор виокремлює особливу знахідку, а саме – залишки керамічного диска з групою фішок до нього. Ця знахідка в науковому світі дістала назву Небелівський Диск. Відзначено, що засадничим явищем інтер’єрного простору Небелівського Храму стала умовна яма (заглиблення) у самому центрі ритуального залу. Вона є центральною храмовою точкою, яка надає ключ до інтерпретації головного храмового символу, котрий ймовірно був рослинного походження. У статті проводяться паралелі між головним ритуальним залом Трипільського Храму (...) та особливою ритуальною спорудою ведичної релігії «prâcînavamsa» («прачинаванса»), в якій проводився найголовніший ритуал ведичної релігії «ашвамедха». Це засвідчує значну подібність двох сакральних споруд, а найголовніше – це подібність заглиблень у центрі священного простору, яке позначалося «Світовим Деревом» (за В. Топоровим). Автор доводить, що особливості інтер’єрного наповнення Небелівського Храму висвітлюють уявлення давніх людей про структуру священного Космосу, про місце людей у ньому та символи, які пов’язують сакральне суспільство з космологічними уявленнями. Особливість даного дослідження полягає в тому, що внутрішнє храмове наповнення є, по суті, матеріалізованим духовним світом давніх землеробів, який транслює їхню релігійну космологію. (shrink)

This article aims at a new interpretation of paragraph §1 of Fichte’s main work of 1794/95, the Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre. This well-known text of the early Jena period explicitly introduces a number of thought motifs that will prove to be valuable for the later versions of the Wissenschaftslehre – including the second version of 1804 – and these motifs will furthermore illuminate the significance of the first principle for Fichte’s entire Wissenschaftslehre.

Dispositions are related to conditionals. Typically a fragile glass will break if struck with force. But possession of the disposition does not entail the corresponding simple (subjunctive or counterfactual) conditional. The phenomena of finks and antidotes show that an object may possess the disposition without the conditional being true. Finks and antidotes may be thought of as exceptions to the straightforward relation between disposition and conditional. The existence of these phenomena are easy to demonstrate at the macro-level. But do they (...) exist at the fundamental level also? While fundamental finkish dispositions may be excluded fairly straightforwardly, the existence of fundamental antidotes is more open. Nonetheless I conclude that the phenomenon is likely to be less widespread than at the macro level and that fundamental antidotes may be eliminable. According to the dispositional essentialist, the laws of nature can be explained by taking natural properties to be essentially dispositional. This account can be extended to show that the existence of finks and antidotes explains ceteris paribus laws. Consequently the existence or otherwise of fundamental finks and antidotes sheds some light on the question of whether fundamental laws may also be ceteris paribus laws. (shrink)

We provide a general theorem implying that for a (strongly) dependent theory T the theory of sufficiently well-behaved pairs of models of T is again (strongly) dependent. We apply the theorem to the case of lovely pairs of thorn-rank one theories as well as to a setting of dense pairs of first-order topological theories.

Darwin in Russian Thought represents the first comprehensive and systematic study of Charles Darwin's influence on Russian thought from the early 1860s to the October Revolution. While concentrating on the role of Darwin's theory in the development of Russian science and philosophy, Vucinich also explores the dominant ideological and sociological interpretations of evolutionary thought, providing a deft analysis of the views held by the leaders of Russian nihilism, populism, anarchism, and marxism. Darwin's thinking profoundly influenced intellectual discourse in Russia: it (...) effected the emergence of "theoretical theology," a modern effort to provide theological responses to the revolutionary changes in the natural sciences, contributed to the evolution of a modern scientific community, and spurred the rapidly growing concern with the epistemological and ethical foundations of science in general. Scholarly battles were waged among the critics of Darwin--Karl von Baer, Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii and Sergei Ivanovich Korzhinskii, and others--and the defenders of the faith. Vucinich is able to delineate the distinctive national characteristics of Russian Darwinism: the strong influence of Lamarckian thought, the delayed recognition of the contributions of genetics, the near-universal rejection of Social Darwinism, the early anticipation of the triumph of "evolutionary synthesis," and the heavy concentration on the social and moral aspects of evolutionary thought. Vividly argued and rich in detail, Darwin in Russian Thought provides a unique glimpse into the Russian psyche. Darwin in Russian Thought represents the first comprehensive and systematic study of Charles Darwin's influence on Russian thought from the early 1860s to the October Revolution. While concentrating on the role of Darwin's theory in the development of Russian science and philosophy, Vucinich also explores the dominant ideological and sociological interpretations of evolutionary thought, providing a deft analysis of the views held by the leaders of Russian nihilism, populism, anarchism, and marxism. Darwin's thinking profoundly influenced intellectual discourse in Russia: it effected the emergence of "theoretical theology," a modern effort to provide theological responses to the revolutionary changes in the natural sciences, contributed to the evolution of a modern scientific community, and spurred the rapidly growing concern with the epistemological and ethical foundations of science in general. Scholarly battles were waged among the critics of Darwin--Karl von Baer, Nikolai Iakovlevich Danilevskii and Sergei Ivanovich Korzhinskii, and others--and the defenders of the faith. Vucinich is able to delineate the distinctive national characteristics of Russian Darwinism: the strong influence of Lamarckian thought, the delayed recognition of the contributions of genetics, the near-universal rejection of Social Darwinism, the early anticipation of the triumph of "evolutionary synthesis," and the heavy concentration on the social and moral aspects of evolutionary thought. Vividly argued and rich in detail, Darwin in Russian Thought provides a unique glimpse into the Russian psyche. (shrink)

The article shows that Kuhn's concept of incommensurability emphasizes mainly the objective dimension of communication. To the thesis about the incommensurability of the meanings of scientific concepts in competing paradigms, we oppose the idea of a three-dimensional space of communicative dimensions. We supplement the objective dimension of communication, within which the environmental evolutionary selection of the best knowledge is carried out, with equal social and temporal horizons.

We characterize þ-independence in a variety of structures, focusing on the field of real numbers expanded by predicate defining a dense multiplicative subgroup, G, satisfying the Mann property and whose pth powers are of finite index in G. We also show such structures are super-rosy and eliminate imaginaries up to codes for small sets.

That government agencies and public bodies can be liable for damages when they induce and then frustrate people’s legitimate expectations is an important and distinctive feature of administrative law in Europe. This article sets out to establish a set of moral principles and ideals that might justify this legal institution. The notion of security of expectations found in the work of utilitarian writers provides a starting point. Having examined the strengths and weaknesses of this approach, I then turn to consider (...) an alternative argument based on finding a solution to the problem of credible commitments. Finally, I look for suitable moral arguments in the liberal and Kantian political theorising of John Rawls. I argue that if we see the function of the rule of law as not merely to maximise aggregate utility and to make policymakers’ decisions seem credible but also to ensure Justice as Fairness for individuals, then this provides a more robust and satisfactory way to justify the liability of public bodies for legitimate expectations they induce and then frustrate. (shrink)

At every moment, somewhere in the world, a group of men and women are sitting around a table deliberating about an ethical issue posed by medicine and research, whether as a research ethics committee; a hospital or clinical ethics committee; a stem‐cell review committee; a gene transfer research committee; a biobank ethics committee; an ethics advisory committee for a medical or nursing association or nongovernmental organization; a state, provincial, national, or intergovernmental bioethics committee; or an ad hoc panel examining a (...) particular development or case. However, the last national committee in the United States, the Presidential Commission for the Study of Bioethical Issues, held its final meeting at the end of August 2016 and closed its doors. Should we regret its departure? I believe that the United States would benefit from having another national bioethics advisory body, but I do not think that the commission should simply have continued under a new president in the same form. Instead, looking at the experience of that commission and its six predecessors—who they were, how they worked, the functions they served, and the problems they experienced—we can derive some useful ideas for anyone planning to build the next commission. (shrink)

I present an argument that encapsulates the view that theory is underdetermined by evidence. I show that if we accept Williamson's equation of evidence and knowledge, then this argument is question-begging. I examine ways of defenders of underdetermination may avoid this criticism. I also relate this argument and my critique to van Fraassen's constructive empiricism.

This book explores a range of traditional and contemporary metaphysical themes that figure in the writings of E. J. Lowe, whose powerful and influential work was still developing at the time of his death in 2015. Leading philosophers present new essays on topics to do with ontology, necessity, existence, and mental causation.

Learning more about philosophical cognition has yielded significant insights into the methods that we employ when doing philosophy, and has led some experimental philosophers to raise concerns about the role that intuitions play in philosophical practice. One popular response to these methodological concerns involves appeal to philosophical expertise, and has become known as the expertise defense because it aims to defend the use of at least some kinds of intuitional evidence in philosophy. The basic idea is that philosophical expertise consists (...) in having developed, through a process of critical reflection, increased conceptual competence and theoretical accuracy, as well as a special knack for reading and thinking about philosophical thought experiments that call upon us to exercise our conceptual competence and theoretical acumen. It turns out to be an open question whether this folk theory of philosophical expertise can restore hope in the value of intuitional evidence, and here we examine two ways of trying to answer that question: one that involves careful reflection on the supposed benefits of philosophical education, and one that involves careful empirical examination of “expert” philosophical intuitions. (shrink)

I defend against criticism the following claims concening Thomas Kuhn: (i) there is a strong naturalist streak in The structure of scientific revolutions, whereby Kuhn used the results of a posteriori enquiry in addressing philosophical questions; (ii) as Kuhn's career as a philosopher of science developed he tended to drop the naturalistic elements and to replace them with more traditionally philosophical a prior approaches; (iii) at the same there is a significant residue of positivist thought in Kuhm, which Kuhn did (...) not recognise as such; (iv) the naturalist elements referred to in (i) are the most original and fruitful elements of Kuhn's thinking; (v) the positivistic elements referred to in (iii) vitiated his thought and acted as factors in preventing Kuhn from developing the naturalistic elemtns and from following the path taken by much subsequent philosophy of science. Preston presents an alternative reading of Kuhn which emphasizes the Wittgensteinian elements in Kuhn. I argue that this alternative view is, descriptively, poorly supported by the textual evidence and the facts of the history of philosophy of science in the twentieth century. I provide some defence of the naturalistic approach and related themes. (shrink)

Proposals to use organs from anencephalic infants to meet the growing need for transplantable ogans are well‐meaning but misguided. It would be unwise to amend the Uniform Determination of Death Act to classify anencephalics as “dead.” They are in the same situation as other patients (such as the permanently comatose). Likewise, amending the Anatomical Gin Act to permit organs to be removed from anencephalics would be unjust would set a bad precedent and would likely reduce overall success in this field.

We study the theory of the structure induced by parameter free formulas on a “dense” algebraically independent subset of a model of a geometric theory T. We show that while being a trivial geometric theory, inherits most of the model theoretic complexity of T related to stability, simplicity, rosiness, the NIP and the NTP2. In particular, we show that T is strongly minimal, supersimple of SU‐rank 1, has the NIP or the NTP2 exactly when has these properties. We show that (...) if T is superrosy of thorn rank 1, then so is, and that the converse holds if T satisfies acl = dcl. (shrink)

Applying speech act theory to the phenomenon of hate speech, some philosophers seek to explain how even ordinary people can obtain the capacity, power, or authority to oppress, subordinate, or marginalise the targets of their verbal attacks. Such explanations are answers to what is called the authority problem. However, hitherto these philosophers have focused exclusively on standard examples of racist speech in which members of historically oppressor groups verbally attack members of oppressed groups. In this paper, I address the (or (...) an) authority problem in relation to examples of reverse hate speech, where members of historically oppressed groups verbally attack members of oppressor groups. I critically examine two conventional answers to the authority problem: the first is that even ordinary people can successfully perform prototypical hate speech acts by virtue of being participants in norm-governed social practices of racism; the second is that such people can do so by virtue of the silence of bystanders granting them licensed authority. I argue these conventional answers have lesser explanatory heft as applied to examples of reverse hate speech. I then introduce and defend a third answer to the authority problem, which I believe can adequately account for examples of both standard and reverse hate speech, namely the possession of informal social authority. (shrink)

The first obstacle that confronts the student of induction is that of defining the subject matter. One initial point is to note that much of the relevant subject matter goes under the description ‘the theory of confirmation’. The distinction is primarily that the study of induction concerns inference, i.e. cases where one takes the conclusion to be established by the evidence, whereas confirmation concerns the weight of evidence, which one may take to be something like the credibility of a hypothesis (...) in the light of the evidence. Discussions of confirmation often concern incremental confirmation, i.e. cases where the evidence is taken to increase the credibility of some hypothesis, even if not sufficiently to warrant inferring the truth of that hypothesis. However, some uses of ‘confirmation’ clearly refer to absolute confirmation, cases where the credibility of the hypothesis in the light of the evidence exceeds some (high) threshold. One may ask whether inductive inference corresponds to the case of absolute confirmation for some suitable threshold. I shall discuss inference and confirmation together, though it should be noted that some approaches eschew inference altogether. For example, the Bayesian takes scientific reasoning to be a matter of adjusting credences in propositions in the light of evidence, and says nothing about unqualified belief in a proposition. However, if we are interested in inductive knowledge then we must consider inference, since only then do we have a detached proposition that is the possible content of a mental state of knowing. A more pressing question concerns which inferences (or allegedly confirmatory relations) should be classed as inductive. A natural and straightforward approach is to define induction as encompassing any form of reasoning that extrapolates from one population to another, usually from a sample of a population to the whole population. For example, one might note that all observations of the position of some planet fall on an ellipse that has the Sun at one of its foci; from this one concludes that all the positions that planet takes fall on this ellipse (i.e.. (shrink)

The Covid‐19 pandemic has brought bioethics back to five topics—justice, autonomy, expert authority, religion, and judicial decisions—that were central during its formative period but has cast a new light on each, while also tangling public health policy in the current, rather radical, reshaping of the role of organized religion in society.