If anachronism is an historian's unforgivable sin, as Lucien Fèbvre told us long ago, it is nonetheless unavoidable, if only in the sense that we are constrained by our own point of view, anchored...

Some of the early‐modern changes in the social framing of science, while often believed to be essential, are shown to be contingent. They contribute to the flawed public narrative around science today, and especially to the misconceptions around science and religion. Four are examined in detail, each of which contributes to the demise of the contemplative stance that science both requires and offers. They are: (1) a turn from an immersed subject to the pretense of a pure objectivity, (2) a (...) turn from imagination as a legitimate pathway to knowledge, (3) a turn from shared and participative science to a restricted professionalism, and (4) an overprosaic reading of the metaphor of the “Book of Nature.” All four, but especially the imperative to consider reading nature as poetry, and a deeper examination of the entanglements between poetry and theoretical science, draw unavoidably on theological ideas, and contribute to a developing “theology of science.”. (shrink)

Druzhinin’s insistence that the behaviour portrayed in fictional films can be considered a “reliable source of evidence for […] experiential analysis” of the cognitive use of ….

Arguments are advanced that a theory of possible worlds cannot be a theory of meaning for modal statements, And lewis's version of the theory in his "counterfactuals" is used as a particular stalking-Horse. (a) 'possible world', Though used referentially, Is defined in a way that makes it non-Referential, And moreover, The theory does not supply or validate proposals for criteria that individuate worlds; hence the theory seems incomprehensible. (b) the theory yields no useable account of truth-Conditions for modal statements. (c) (...) a conceptualist version of the theory cannot overcome these problems. (d) lewis's similarity theory of possible worlds as a semantics for counterfactuals sustains in many cases (including one he cites) intuitively untrue counterfactuals and rejects many intuitively correct ones. (shrink)

The criticism that voluntary codes of conduct are ineffective can be met by giving greater centrality to human rights in such codes. Provided the human rights obligations of multinational corporations are interpreted as moral obligations specifically tailored to the situation of multinational corporations, this could serve to bring powerful moral force to bear on MNCs and could provide a legitimating basis for NGO monitoring and persuasion. Approached in this way the human rights obligations of MNCs can be taken to include (...) support for political as well as economic rights. This will go some way towards filling the regulatory gap created by the difficulty of controlling the activities of corporations operating globally. However, such a proposal will require a measure of ‘meta-regulation’ whereby the operations of MNCs are legally required to be sufficiently transparent to create the conditions for effective external moral scrutiny. (shrink)

What grounds and justifies conclusions in medical ethics? Is the source external or internal to medicine? Thee influential types of answer have appeared in recent literature: an internal account, an external account, and a mixed internal / external account. The first defends an ethic derived from either the ends of medicine or professional practice standards. The second maintains that precepts in medical ethics rely upon and require justification by external standards such as those of public opinion, law, religious ethics, or (...) philosophical ethics. The third claims that distinct medical ethics have emerged from distinct cultural frameworks, each with norms that govern physicians. There is merit in each perspective, but each overreaches its supporting arguments and fails to appreciate what is legitimate in the theses of its competitors. I propose a fourth account that offers a way to escape limitations of the other three, while retaining their most attractive features. (shrink)

Two rival paradigms permeate bioethics. One generally favors eugenics, euthanasia, assisted suicide and other methods for those with severely restricting physical and cognitive attributes. The other typically opposes these and favors instead ample support for "persons of difference" and their caring families or loved ones. In an attempt to understand the relation between these two paradigms, this article analyzes a publicly reported debate between proponents of both paradigms, bioethicist Peter Singer and lawyer Harriet McBryde Johnson. At issue, the article concludes, (...) are two distinct axiomatic sets of values resulting in not simply different styles of rhetoric but different vocabularies, in effect two different languages of ethics. (shrink)

Affirmative action refers to positive steps taken to hire persons from groups previously and presently discriminated against. Considerable evidence indicates that this discrimination is intractable and cannot be eliminated by the enforcement of laws. Numerical goals and quotas are justified if and only if they are necessary to overcome the discriminatory effects that could not otherwise be eliminated with reasonable efficiency. Many past as well as present policies are justified in this way.

Using an observational sample of players of a simple online game, we are able to trace the development of skill in that game. Information on playing time, and player location, allows us to estimate time of day during which practice took place. We compare those whose breaks in practice probably contained a night's sleep and those whose breaks in practice probably did not contain a night's sleep. Our analysis confirms experimental evidence showing a benefit of spacing for skill learning, but (...) it fails to find any additional benefit of sleeping during a break from practice. We discuss reasons why the well-established phenomenon of sleep consolidation might not manifest in an observational study of skill development. We put the spacing effect into the context of the other known influences on skill learning: improvement with practice, and individual differences in initial performance. Analysis of performance data from games allows experimental results to be demonstrated outside of the lab and for experimental phenomenon to be put in the context of the performance of the whole task. (shrink)

In a health service with limited resources we must make decisions about who to treat first. In this paper I develop a version of the restoration argument according to which those whose need for resources is a consequence of their voluntary choices should receive lower priority when it comes to health care. I then consider three possible problems for this argument based on those that have been raised against other theories of this type: that we don't know in a particular (...) case that the illness is self-inflicted, that it seems that all illness is self-inflicted in the sense used in my argument, and finally that this type of approach incorporates an unacceptable moralising element if it is to avoid giving those like fire-fighters a lower priority for treatment. I argue that the position outlined here has the resources to respond to each of these objections. (shrink)

Everyday life as a sociological/philosophical concept is widely considered to be both a familiar and yet taken-for-granted subject matter for analytic investigation. In considering the works of three leading scholars, Michel de Certeau, Harold Garfinkel, and John Fiske, one can look toward possible referents to this term. Starting with Certeau’s critical semiotics of the everyday, with its emphasis on such distinctions as place and space as well as strategies and tactics, the everyday can be theorized in terms of contrasts between (...) discourse and practice. Similarly, with Garfinkel’s ethnomethodological emphasis on the practical actor and Fiske’s ethnographic and cultural studies emphasis on local meaning, the everyday can be conceptualized in terms of distinctions between lived order and a theorized version of the everyday. By examining the approaches of these three scholars as well as drawing upon a visual examination of everyday urban scenes, the article concludes with an affirmation of a multi-conceptual and methodological approach to the everyday and with recognition of the everyday as a signifier loaded with a multitude of possibly overlapping meanings. (shrink)

At Iliad 13.751-3, Hector heeds Polydamas' advice to rally the Trojans by gathering their best fighters together and debating their next move. The speech is followed by a simile that has puzzled some commentators, in which Hector is compared to a snowy mountain as he moves through the Trojan ranks. The passage runs as follows: ‘Πουλυδάμα σὺ μὲν αὐτοῦ ἐρύκακε πάντας ἀρίστους,αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ κεῖσ’ εἶμι καὶ ἀντιόω πολέμοιο·αἶψα δ’ ἐλεύσομαι αὖτις ἐπὴν εὖ τοῖς ἐπιτείλω.’ἦ ῥα, καὶ ὁρμήθη ὄρεϊ νιφόεντι ἐοικὼςκεκλήγων, (...) διὰ δὲ Τρώων πέτετ’ ἠδ’ ἐπικούρων. 755οἳ δ’ ἐς Πανθοΐδην ἀγαπήνορα Πουλυδάμανταπάντες ἐπεσσεύοντ’, ἐπεὶ Ἕκτορος ἔκλυον αὐδήν.‘Polydamas, hold all the best men here, while I go there and face the battle. I shall swiftly come back again, when I have given my orders to the men.’ He spoke and rushed off appearing like a snowy mountain, crying out, and flew through the ranks of the Trojans and their allies, and they all rushed to the kindly-minded Polydamas, Panthoos’ son, when they heard Hector's voice. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry by Pauline A. LeVenTom PhillipsPauline A. LeVen. The Many-Headed Muse: Tradition and Innovation in Late Classical Greek Lyric Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014. x + 377 pp. Cloth, $99.The “New Music” of the late fifth and early fourth centuries b.c.e. has been subject to a revival of interest in recent years. Most scholarship, however, has (...) tended to focus either on socio-historical aspects of performance culture or on the philological problems posed by texts such as Timotheus’ Persians. The corpus of fourth-century hymns by authors such as Aristonous and Philodamus has likewise been a minority pursuit, addressed in the main by historians of religion and epigraphers rather than literary critics. This monograph provides a welcome change in emphasis. Resolutely literary in her approach, LeVen elaborates readings that challenge assumptions about a qualitative decline in late classical literature, arguing instead for reading these texts in terms of their particular interpretative demands and situating them in a continuum of literary developments. The New Musicians emerge not as vapidly showy musical and dramatic virtuosos, but as composers of considerable verbal sophistication who developed and extended traditional poetic techniques while also demanding new kinds of emotional and interpretative engagement from audiences. The textual strategies at work in the hymnic corpus are also brought into sharper relief, particularly as regards the effects created by the interplay of performance and material inscription. The result is a valuable contribution to scholarship: as well as situating the New Music in relation to earlier song culture, LeVen shows how some of the strategies [End Page 357] employed by Timotheus and his contemporaries anticipate literary developments in the Hellenistic period. As such, this book will be of interest to all students of ancient Greek poetry.The book begins with an overview of poetic activity in the late classical period, including a useful set of tables that present the literary and epigraphic sources grouped by type. LeVen also surveys developments in scholarship on the New Music, recapitulating the case for caution when assessing the evidence of ancient critics and comedians, and making a strong case for the importance of engaging with the poems’ “dynamics of allusion, emulation, and intertextuality” (69). The rest of the book consists of case studies concerned with individual authors and corpora, and thematic chapters discussing the New Musicians’ linguistic innovations. The first group includes a chapter on Philoxenus of Cythera (chap. 3), a discussion of the Dinner Party attributed to Philoxenus (chap. 6), and readings of the inscribed hymns (chap. 7). The discussion of Philoxenus of Cythera focuses mainly on the anecdotes about his life preserved by Athenaeus, Machon, and other later authors. LeVen explores these texts’ persistent concern with the interrelated issues of food, xenia, and poetry, and their varying figurations of Philoxenus’ character. She also argues convincingly that the Dinner Party (PMG 836) should be attributed to Philoxenus of Cythera (114–18), and a good part of chapter 6 is devoted to an analysis of this text. Her readings emphasize the poem’s creation of an interpretative dialogue: the speaker presents not just an ekphrasis but also an “appeal to his own feelings and to those of his internal addressee” which underlines the “social dimension” of dining (257). More controversially, she also argues that it was performed as a dithyramb: as a text performed on the public stage, its detailed descriptions of fine dining “collaps[e] the distinction between... the public competitions at festivals and sacrifices and the private elegant home” (261).In her concluding remarks about the role played by the symposium in fourth-century poetic culture, LeVen sees the distinctiveness of the period not in poems being performed in multiple locations but in “the open traffic” between public and private performance settings, “the symposium importing passages from the dramatic stage and exporting some of its traditional motives and forms of expression to more public settings, dramatic and beyond” (268). The remainder of chapter 6 is concerned with the hymns to Virtue and Health of Aristotle and Ariphron, while chapter 7 deals with inscribed hymns such as the Erythrean paeans, Aristonous’ Hymn... (shrink)

Current theories of emotions and emotional machines often assume too homogeneous a conception of what emotions are in terms of whether they are experienced as one's own emotions (“internal” emotions) or whether they are perceived as the emotions of other agents (“external” emotions). In contrast, this paper argues, first, that an answer to the question of whether machines can possess emotions requires such a distinction—the distinction between internal emotions-had and external emotions-perceived. Second, it argues that the emotions we perceive in (...) other agents can be explicated as indicators of likely imminent paths or patterns of behavior of those agents. As will be shown, perceiving emotions in others does not necessarily involve the ontological attribution of corresponding emotions-had to the subject which is perceived as exhibiting a particular emotion-perceived. Thus, it will be shown that we can, for example, perceive an agent as angry without (ontologically) attributing anger (as an emotion-had) to that agent. If we apply this reasoning to emotional robots, it follows that there is no deception involved in perceiving a robot as exhibiting a particular emotion, as long as its behavior realizes and continues to realize the behavioral form of that external emotion-perceived. Thus, a robot’s behavior can fully instantiate emotions-perceived. In order to elaborate these claims, the presented view will be contrasted with Gibson’s conception of “affordances.” The final section discusses whether these considerations might have broader implications for our view of human perception in general. (shrink)

The paper looks at how Tsong kha pa, mKhas grub, and Go rams pa understood the third and fourth lemmas in the tetralemma, “both A and B” and “neither A nor B,” respectively.

Researchers working on drug addiction may, for a variety of reasons, want to carry out research which involves giving addicts their drug of choice. In carrying out this research consent needs to be obtained from those addicts recruited to participate in it. Concerns have been raised about whether or not such addicts are able to give this consent. Despite their differences, however, both sides in this debate appear to be agreed that the way to resolve this issue is to determine (...) whether or not addicts have irresistible cravings for drugs – if they do, then they cannot consent to this type of research; if they do not, then they can. This I will argue is a mistake. Determining whether or not addicts can say 'No' to offers of drugs will not help us to make much progress here. Instead we need to look at the various ways in which different types of research may undermine an addict's competence to give consent. What we will find is that the details of the research make a big difference here and that, as such, we need to steer a course between, on the one hand, painting all addicts as being unable to consent to research which involves providing them with drugs, and, on the other, maintaining that there are no problems in obtaining consent from addicts to take part in such research. (shrink)

These original essays, never published before, suggest the breadth and richness of Johann Gottlieb Fichte's philosophy and are signs of the contemporary effort to explore the relationship between his system of thought and current philosophical debates. Some of the issues discussed included the relationship between "theoretical" and "practical" reason; the philosophy of language; antifoundationalism; the juridical status of women; duties toward natural beings; and the political implications of the Wissenschaftslehre. In addition, the volume includes an introduciton that surveys the history (...) of Fichte interpretation in the English-speaking world and assesses the current state of Fichte studies. (shrink)

It is appropriate to ask about the prospects for metaphysics at the present time as we near the end of a century in which, perhaps more than at any other moment in its long history, metaphysics has been under persistent, unrelenting attack. The traditional concern with metaphysics is very old, depending on the definition, as old as philosophy, even its main theme. Depending on the point of view, much is at stake in the continued viability of metaphysics, including the viability (...) of a central philosophical theme or even the very viability of philosophy itself as a meaningful enterprise. (shrink)