Science is the study of our world, as it is in its messy reality. Nonetheless, science requires idealization to function—if we are to attempt to understand the world, we have to find ways to reduce its complexity. Idealization and the Aims of Science shows just how crucial idealization is to science and why it matters. Beginning with the acknowledgment of our status as limited human agents trying to make sense of an exceedingly complex world, Angela Potochnik moves on to (...) explain how science aims to depict and make use of causal patterns—a project that makes essential use of idealization. She offers case studies from a number of branches of science to demonstrate the ubiquity of idealization, shows how causal patterns are used to develop scientific explanations, and describes how the necessarily imperfect connection between science and truth leads to researchers’ values influencing their findings. The resulting book is a tour de force, a synthesis of the study of idealization that also offers countless new insights and avenues for future exploration. (shrink)

Aimed at undergraduates, _Contemporary Ethics_ presupposes little or no familiarity with ethics and is written in a clear and engaging style. It provides students with a sympathetic but critical guide to utilitarianism, explaining its different forms and exploring the debates it has spawned. The book leads students through a number of current issues in contemporary ethics that are connected to controversies over and within utilitarianism. At the same time, it uses utilitarianism to introduce students to ethics as a subject. In (...) these ways, the book is not only a guide to utilitarianism, but also an introduction to some standard problems of ethics and to several important topics in contemporary ethical theory. (shrink)

This paper argues that there are two distinct kinds of senses, immediate senses and reflective senses. Immediate senses are what we are immediately aware of when we are in an intentional mental state, while reflective senses are what we understand of an intentional mental state's (putative) referent upon reflection. I suggest an account of immediate and reflective senses that is based on the phenomenal intentionality theory, a theory of intentionality in terms of phenomenal consciousness. My focus is on the immediate (...) and reflective senses of thoughts and the concepts they involve, but it also applies to other mental instances of intentionality. (shrink)

This volume presents the first Italian translation with commentary of the Doric Pseudo-Pythagorean texts, which are ascribed to Archytas and Brontinus and deal with metaphysical, logical, and epistemological questions. These texts probably date from the 1st century BCE and are the product of a re-emerging dogmatic interpretation of Plato's dialogues.

This book offers a detailed utilitarian analysis of the ethical issues involved in war. Utilitarianism and the Ethics of War addresses the two basic ethical questions posed by war: when, if ever, are we morally justified in waging war, and if recourse to arms is warranted, how are we permitted to fight the wars we wage? In addition, it deals with the challenge that realism and relativism raise for the ethical discussion of war, and with the duties of military personnel (...) and the moral challenges they can face. In tackling these matters, the book covers a wide range of topics—from pacifism to armed humanitarian intervention, from the right of national defense to pre-emptive or preventive war, from civilian immunity to the tenets of just war theory and the moral underpinnings of the rules of war. But, what is distinctive about this book is that it provides a consistent and thorough-going utilitarian or consequentialist treatment of the fundamental normative issues that war occasions. Although it goes against the tide of recent work in the field, a utilitarian approach to the ethics of war illuminates old questions in new ways by showing how a concern for well-being and the consequences of our actions and policies shape the moral constraints to which states and other actors must adhere. This book will be of much interest to students of the ethics of war, just war theory, moral philosophy, war and conflict studies and IR. (shrink)

Medical interventions such as methadone treatment for drug addicts or “chemical castration” for sex offenders have been used in several jurisdictions alongside or as an alternative to traditional punishments, such as incarceration. As our understanding of the biological basis for human behaviour develops, our criminal justice system may make increasing use of such medical techniques and may become less reliant on incarceration. Academic debate on this topic has largely focused on whether offenders can validly consent to medical interventions, given the (...) coercive environment of the criminal justice system. Both sides in this debate share the assumption that administering medical interventions to offenders without their valid consent would be unethical. Recently, Thomas Douglas has mounted a formidable challenge to this “consent requirement”. Essentially, his argument rests on a comparison between prison and medical interventions. Douglas asks: if the state is entitled to impose a prison sentence on a criminal without the criminal’s consent, why is consent required for the imposition of a medical intervention? The most obvious way of defending the consent requirement against Douglas’s challenge appeals to the fact that incarceration merely interferes with the right to free movement, but medical interventions interfere with the right to bodily integrity. This argument rests on what Douglas calls the “robustness claim”—the claim that the right to bodily integrity is more robust than the right to freedom of movement. In other words, the right to freedom of movement loses its protective force in a wider range of circumstances than the right to bodily integrity. Douglas’s article seeks to undermine the robustness claim, by arguing that neither case-based intuitions, nor theoretical considerations support this claim. In this article, I will attempt to raise some doubts about Douglas’s challenge to the consent requirement and the robustness claim. (shrink)

Originally delivered at a conference of Marxist philosophers in China, this article examines some links, and some tensions, between business ethics and the traditional concerns of Marxism. After discussing the emergence of business ethics as an academic discipline, it explores and attempts to answer two Marxist objections that might be brought against the enterprise of business ethics. The first is that business ethics is impossible because capitalism itself tends to produce greedy, overreaching, and unethical business behavior. The second is that (...) business ethics is irrelevant because focusing on the moral or immoral conduct of individual firms or businesspeople distracts one’s attention from the systemic vices of capitalism. I argue, to the contrary, that, far from being impossible, business requires and indeed presupposes ethics and that for those who share Marx’s hope for a better society, nothing could be more relevant than engaging the debate over corporate social responsibility. In line with this, the article concludes by sketching some considerations favoring corporations’ adopting a broader view of their social and moral responsibilities, one that encompasses more than the pursuit of profit. (shrink)

This paper explores religious belief in connection with epistemological disjunctivism. It applies recent advances in epistemological disjunctivism to the religious case for displaying an attractive model of specifically Christian religious belief. What results is a heretofore unoccupied position in religious epistemology—a view I call ‘religious epistemological disjunctivism’. My general argument is that RED furnishes superior explanations for the sort of ‘grasp of the truth’ which should undergird ‘matured Christian conviction’ of religious propositions. To this end I first display the more (...) familiar perceptual epistemological disjunctivism, contrasting it with both externalist and classically internalist views. This prepares the way for introducing RED with its own distinctive factive mental state operator—pneuming that p. In this second section I present the RED model, not failing to address a potential problem concerning religious disagreement. I also clarify RED’s distinctive internalist aspect, describing how it comports with contemporary internalist thinking in epistemology. I then move in section three to criticize externalist and classical internalist views, showing where they fail to make proper sense of the sort of knowing which should ground mature Christian conviction. Specifically, I highlight three intuitions which I think any theory of religious belief should capture: what I call the case-closed intuition, the good believer intuition, and the Plantingian platitude. This is all to set up for the final section where I argue that RED is superior for understanding proper religious believing—capturing the aforementioned intuitions. (shrink)

Making data broadly accessible is essential to creating a medical information commons. Transparency about data-sharing practices can cultivate trust among prospective and existing MIC participants. We present an analysis of 34 initiatives sharing DNA-derived data based on public information. We describe data-sharing practices captured, including practices related to consent, privacy and security, data access, oversight, and participant engagement. Our results reveal that data-sharing initiatives have some distance to go in achieving transparency.

As one of the foremost contemporary public intellectuals and scholars of our time, Hamid Dabashi's interests and writings span subjects ranging from Islamic philosophy and political ideology to Iranian art and Persian literature; from Sufism and Orientalism to Iranian and world cinema and contemporary Arab and Muslim visual arts; and from postcolonial theory and globalization to imperialism and public affairs. There is a direct connection between his theoretical innovations and the angle of his public interventions on the urgent global issues (...) of the day. This book brings together some of his most important writings, especially those that offer new ways of understanding Islam, Iran, Islamist ideology, global art, and the condition of global modernity. The book shows the underlying conceptual themes that unify Dabashi's wide-ranging and brilliantly insightful corpus. Book jacket. (shrink)

Emerging biotechnology may soon allow the creation of genetically human organs inside animals, with non-human primates and pigs being the best candidate species. This prospect raises the question of whether creating organs in primates in order to then transplant them into humans would be more acceptable than using them for research. In this paper, we examine the validity of the purported moral distinction between primates and other animals, and analyze the ethical acceptability of using primates to create organs for human (...) use. (shrink)

Advances in technologies and biomedical informatics have expanded capacity to generate and share biomedical data. With a lens on genomic data, we present a typology characterizing the data-sharing landscape in biomedical research to advance understanding of the key stakeholders and existing data-sharing practices. The typology highlights the diversity of data-sharing efforts and facilitators and reveals how novel data-sharing efforts are challenging existing norms regarding the role of individuals whom the data describe.

This paper reads Republic 583b-608b as a single, continuous line of argument. First, Socrates distinguishes real from apparent pleasure and argues that justice is more pleasant than injustice. Next, he describes how pleasures nourish the soul. This line of argument continues into the second discussion of poetry: tragic pleasures are mixed pleasures in the soul that seem greater than they are; indulging them nourishes appetite and corrupts the soul. The paper argues that Plato has a novel account of the ‘paradox (...) of tragedy’, and that the Republic and Philebus contain complementary discussions of tragic and comic pleasure. (shrink)

Families and children are hidden victims of labor exploitation in the US economy across the economic spectrum. The Sabbath commandment, however, provides a theological basis for resisting this structural evil. In Karl Barth’s discussion of the commandment, Sabbath rest not only limits the scope of economic activity in human life but also sets the stage for reflection on the meaning and purpose of work. As a recurring reminder that human life is a gift to be lived in joyful fellowship with (...) God and neighbor, Sabbath observance can be a crucial practice to orient work toward the flourishing of individuals, families, and communities. (shrink)

In this article, I focus on de Beauvoir’s view and argue that, alongside an original account of existential freedom, she utilises a Marxist-inspired historical materialism as a methodological tool with which to analyse the social position of women. First, I discuss existential freedom and highlight de Beauvoir’s introduction of gender, whereby the concepts of material, social and situational conditions cohere to restrict the possibility of freedom and agency for women. Next, I explore Marx’s view on freedom and de Beauvoir’s endorsement (...) that in order to promote human flourishing, structural and material change is required. Although some tensions prevail, I conclude that by weaving together existentialism, phenomenology and Marxism in her unique way, Simone de Beauvoir offers a complex and nuanced approach to human freedom. (shrink)

This book provides a broad survey of many of the major areas in neuroplasticity research by leading investigators in the field. The topics considered range across all levels of nervous system organization from the molecular to behavioral levels for species ranging from _C. elegans_ to humans. In addition, the effects of development and neuropathological events are discussed. A final summary chapter synthesizes the data gathered in this volume in order to provide the basis for a general theory of neuroplasticity.

In this paper we argue that hermeneutics acquires additional relevance in the era of technology. In particular legal hermeneutics offers examples of how the use of specific instruments aimed at constituting legal objects (like the digital instruments used by notaries) demonstrate that legal professions will never be entirely delegated to machines. The capacity to use the instruments and the very functioning of those instruments can never be detached from comprehension, and from legal savoir.

Cognitive and Social Neuroscience of Aging is an introduction to how aging affects the brain, intended for audiences with some knowledge of psychology, aging, or neuroscience. The book includes figures illustrating brain regions so that extensive familiarity with neuroanatomy is not a pre-requisite. The depth of coverage also makes this book appropriate for those with considerable knowledge about aging. This book adopts an integrative perspective, including topics such as memory, cognition, cognitive training, emotion, and social processes. Topics include consideration of (...) individual differences and the impact of disorders on brain function with age. Although many declines occur with age, cognitive neuroscience research reveals plasticity and adaptation in the brain as a function of normal aging. This book is written with this perspective in mind, emphasizing the ways in which neuroscience methods have enriched and changed thinking about aging. (shrink)

This pilot explores embodiment and gender representation through the lens of choreographic practice and sociology. The perspective derives from a comparative lack of status held by female (vs male) choreographers in the UK. The pilot study specifically addresses how choreography itself embodies and perpetuates sociocultural values. This work is part of a larger, on-going ethnographic study into the social world(s) of choreography and choreographers. The method is a process of dance making called Sonnet that would expose habitual expectations of dance (...) performances. The process was designed to heighten awareness, nudge and challenge dancers and audience members to reflect on what they normally take for granted. Using Pierre Bourdieu’s critique and notion of habitus (embodiment), the study indicates perpetuating social hierarchy in dance training and practice. This is explored and framed from Bourdieu’s social and cultural perspective. (shrink)

Ideally, guidelines reflect an accepted position with respect to matters of concern, ranging from clinical practices to researcher behaviour. Upon close reading, authorship guidelines reserve authorship attribution to individuals fully or almost fully embedded in particular studies, including design or execution as well as significant involvement in the writing process. These requirements prescribe an organisation of scientific work in which this embedding is specifically enabled. Drawing from interviews with nutrition scientists at universities and in the food industry, we demonstrate that (...) the organisation of research labour can deviate significantly from such prescriptions. The organisation of labour, regardless of its content, then, has consequences for who qualifies as an author. The fact that fewer food industry employees qualify is actively used by the food industry to manage the credibility and ownership of their knowledge claims as allonymous science: the attribution of science assisted by authorship guidelines blind to all but one organisational frame. (shrink)

Asclépius est un commentateur aristotélicien du VI e siècle après J.-C., qui – élève d’Ammonius – étudie à l’école néoplatonicienne d’Alexandrie en Égypte. Il réalise l’exégèse de divers passages de la Métaphysique dans lesquels Aristote attribue à Platon la doctrine de l’existence de substances mathématiques séparées (avec une position intermédiaire entre les substances intelligibles et les sensibles) et, en même temps, la critique fortement. Asclépius a une attitude de conciliation entre les perspectives platonicienne et aristotélicienne. D’une part, il défend la (...) doctrine de l’existence de substances mathématiques séparées du monde sensible et supérieures à lui, et ce faisant il s’aligne sur la défense de la doctrine platonicienne déjà opérée par les néoplatoniciens Syrianus et Proclus. Cependant, d’autre part, il adopte aussi la position aristotélicienne et celle d’Alexandre d’Aphrodise, si bien qu’il existe aussi des entités mathématiques qui ne sont pas des substances, mais des caractéristiques mathématiques formelles immanentes au sensible. Enfin, les entités mathématiques sont aussi de simples concepts mentaux obtenus par abstraction du sensible. En parlant d’entités mathématiques non substantielles, Asclépius s’aligne sur Aristote et son commentateur peripatéticien Alexandre. Asclépius, grâce à une vision hiérarchisée de la réalité, peut admettre trois types d’entités mathématiques, de sorte que chaque type inférieur est une copie atténuée de celui qui lui est supérieur. (shrink)

This study is an analysis of 186 psychologists' attitudes on what constitutes ethical practice when counseling clients who present with a range of concerns related to their experience of same-sex attraction and behavior. Three different groups of psychologists were surveyed: generalists, specialists in gay and lesbian issues, and religiously affiliated psychologists. Participants also rated the effectiveness of several professional experiences in providing education, direction, sanctions, or support to regulate the practice of counseling nonheterosexual clients. Significant group differences were found regarding (...) what is considered best, acceptable, and unacceptable practice with clients presenting with same-sex attraction issues. Significant differences were also found among the three groups in what respondents rated as effective elements of their clinical experience. Keywords: gay, lesbian, religion, survey. (shrink)

Oncologists frequently have to break bad news to patients. Although they are not normally the ones who tell patients that they have cancer, they are the ones who have to tell patients that treatment is not working, and they are almost always the ones who have to tell them that they are going to die and that nothing more can be done to cure them. Perhaps the most difficult cases are those where further treatment is almost certainly futile, but there (...) remains an extremely slim chance of yet more aggressive treatment having a near-miraculous effect. In such situations, it can be difficult for the oncologist to decide how to explain things to the patient, and how much to tell them. It can also be very difficult to achieve the correct balance between respecting the patient’s autonomy and not exposing them to harm. This paper examines an example of one such case and makes three suggestions. First, that respecting autonomy cannot be achieved by maximising information-sharing only to deny patients the chance to make decisions based on that information; second, that the simplistic application of the principles of nonmaleficence and respect for autonomy can lead to erroneous conclusions about the most ethical course of action; and third, that there is an extra reason, in addition to respecting patients’ autonomy, for attempting near-futile last-ditch interventions: when treating rare conditions, useful evidence can be generated that will benefit future patients. (shrink)

This essay presents an overview of what I call “Cartesian egalitarianism,” a current of political thought that runs from François Poullain de la Barre, through Simone de Beauvoir, to Jacques Rancière. The impetus for this egalitarianism, I argue, is derived from Descartes’ supposition that “good sense” or “reason” is equally distributed among all people. Although Descartes himself limits the egalitarian import of this supposition, I claim that we can nevertheless identify three features of this subsequent tradition or tendency. First, Cartesian (...) egalitarians think political agency as a practice of subjectivity. Second, they share the supposition that there is an equality of intelligences and abilities shared by all human beings. Third, these thinkers conceptualize politics as a processing of a wrong, meaning that politics initiates new practices through which those who were previously oppressed assert themselves as self-determining political subjects. (shrink)