Hyperbaric oxygen (HBO) therapy still lacks proper interpretations of its many actions. This hypothesis is based on reports of temporarily elevated peripheral vascular resistance (PVR) during HBO sessions. Besides that, during HBO sessions, hyperoxygenated tissues can reduce their perfusion so much that CO2 can accumulate in them. Tissue perfusion depends on vascular innervation and on the balance between systemic constrictors and local dilators. During an HBO session, increased tissue oxygen levels suppress dilatory mechanisms. Tissue hyperoxygenation increases PVR, suggesting that the (...) HBO action on an edematous tissue may be caused by an oxygen‐induced disbalance among Starling capillary forces. The presented hypothesis is that oxygen‐caused arteriolar constriction reduces the hydrostatic pressure in downstream capillaries. Thus, more tissue fluid is absorbed in vascular capillaries, under the condition that the plasma colloid osmotic pressure remains unaltered during the HBO session. Among several known mechanisms behind the HBO actions, the vasoconstriction has been listed as a therapeutic modality for the reduction of the tissue edema, for a crush injury, for burns (in an acute phase), and for the compartment syndrome. The Bell's palsy is among often listed indications for the HBO treatment, although evidence is poor and reports of randomized trials are scarce. (shrink)

Abstract:Skepticism about grounding is the view that ground-theoretic concepts shouldn’t be used in meta­physical theorizing. Possible reasons for adopting this attitude are numerous: perhaps grounding is unintelligible; or perhaps it’s never instantiated; or perhaps it’s just too heterogeneous to be theor­­­­­etically useful. Unfortunately, as currently pursued the debate between grounding enthusiasts and skeptics is insufficiently structured. This paper’s purpose is to impose a measure of conceptual rigor on the debate by offering an opinionated taxonomy of views with a reasonable claim (...) to being “skeptical.” I argue that carving up logical space into pro- and anti-grounding views isn’t especially helpful; rather, we should recognize various degrees of ground-theoretic involvement depending on how inflationary our understanding of the theoretical term ‘ground’ is. (shrink)

Chapter 20 David Kovacs’ “Essence, Grounding, and Explanation” sets out four different ways in which essence might be taken to relate to the notion of grounding or metaphysical explanation, i.e., the type of connection that is often expressed by means of non-causal “in virtue of” or “because”-claims: (i) Unity: essence and grounding belong to a unified set of explanatory concepts; (ii) Supplementation: essence and grounding both contribute in their own way to a distinctive type of explanation; (iii) Independence: essence is (...) a sui generis notion with no straightforward conceptual links to grounding; and (iv) Irrelevance: essence is not an explanatory notion at all and therefore should not be viewed as connected to explanatory notions like grounding. As Kovacs brings out in the chapter, a wide variety of attitudes are represented in the literature even among philosophers who are sympathetic to the recent “hyperintensional” turn in metaphysics when it comes to the question of how the notions of essence and grounding interact with one another. (shrink)

The Third City , first published in 1982, offers an innovative response to the troubled relationship between Western philosophy, as it has been conducted since the Renaissance, and the everyday lives of the communities in which we live. Bebek contends that the model of philosophical reflection is to be found in Plato’s dialogues, which, rather than simply describing utopia through a series of abstract ‘concepts’, were instead designed to impel the learner towards a recognition of the true nature of reality (...) – as much a ‘self-recognition’ as an understanding of the world ‘out there’. Thus, in order to revive the spirit of true philosophy, it is necessary to avoid both the false extremes of idealism and materialism, and to allow ethics once more to merge with epistemology. This title presents an exposition of this ethically based philosophy, allowing the very human insights of Plato to illumine the diverse problems of today. (shrink)

Despite the enormous size of the illicit market in the United States, there is a paucity of research concerning the rights of consumers of illegal products. In this article it is argued that the illicit nature of a transaction should not deny consumers the right to safety and redress. Recognition of these rights is not only in line with the public policy goal, i.e., protecting public interests, but it can also serve as a deterrent factor for the sales of illegal (...) products. (shrink)

On many currently popular ontologies of material objects, we share our place with numerous shorter-lived things that came into existence after we did or will go out of existence before we will. Subpeople are intrinsically indistinguishable from possible people, and as several authors pointed out, this raises grave ethical concerns: it threatens to make any sacrifice for long-term goals impermissible, as well as to undermine our standard practices of punishment, reward, grief, and utility calculation. The aim in this paper is (...) to offer a unified set of solutions to these problems. The paper’s starting point is the "self-making view," according to which our de se beliefs help determine our own spatiotemporal boundaries. This paper argues that the self-making view also plays a key role in the best treatment of the moral problems of subpeople. (shrink)

This paper develops and motivates a unification theory of metaphysical explanation, or as I will call it, Metaphysical Unificationism. The theory’s main inspiration is the unification account of scientific explanation, according to which explanatoriness is a holistic feature of theories that derive a large number of explananda from a meager set of explanantia, using a small number of argument patterns. In developing Metaphysical Unificationism, I will point out that it has a number of interesting consequences. The view offers a novel (...) conception of metaphysical explanation that doesn’t rely on the notion of a “determinative” or “explanatory” relation; it allows us to draw a principled distinction between metaphysical and scientific explanations; it implies that naturalness and fundamentality are distinct but intimately related notions; and perhaps most importantly, it re-establishes the unduly neglected link between explanation and understanding in the metaphysical realm. A number of objections can be raised against the view, but I will argue that none of these is conclusive. The upshot is that Metaphysical Unificationism provides a powerful and hitherto overlooked alternative to extant theories of metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

How is grounding related to metaphysical explanation? The standard view is that the former somehow “backs”, “undergirds” or “underlies” the latter. This view fits into a general picture of explanation, according to which explanations in general hold in virtue of a certain elite group of “explanatory relations” or “determinative relations” that back them. This paper turns the standard view on its head: grounding doesn't “back” metaphysical explanation but is in an important sense downstream from it. I call this view “grounding (...) idealism”, since it structurally resembles an analogous view about causation that is known as “causal idealism” and has been endorsed by philosophers like Michael Scriven and Philip Kitcher. I formulate a specific version of grounding idealism, Metaphysical Explanation‐First Idealism (MEFI), according to which the semantic value of ‘grounding’ is an abundant, gerrymandered relation settled by the metaphysical explanation facts. Then I offer some theoretical considerations that support MEFI over rival accounts of the relation between grounding and metaphysical explanation. Finally, I address the question of what role is left for grounding to play, if not that of “backing” metaphysical explanations. (shrink)

The Problem of Overlappers is a puzzle about what makes it the case, and how we can know, that we have the parts we intuitively think we have. In this paper, I develop and motivate an overlooked solution to this puzzle. According to what I call the self-making view it is within our power to decide what we refer to with the personal pronoun ‘I’, so the truth of most of our beliefs about our parts is ensured by the very (...) mechanism of self-reference. Other than providing an elegant solution to the Problem of Overlappers, the view can be motivated on independent grounds. It also has wide-ranging consequences for how we should be thinking about persons. Among other things, it can help undermine an influential line of argument against the permissibility of elective amputation. After a detailed discussion and defence of the self-making view, I consider some objections to it. I conclude that none of these objections is persuasive and we should at the very least take seriously the idea that we are to some extent self-made. (shrink)

Do pregnant mothers have fetuses as parts? According to the “parthood view” they do, while according to the “containment view” they don’t. This paper raises a novel puzzle about pregnancy: if mothers have their fetuses as parts, then wherever there is a pregnant mother, there is also a smaller thinking being that has every part of the mother except for those that overlap with the fetus. This problem resembles a familiar overpopulation puzzle from the personal identity literature, known as the (...) “Thinking Parts Problem”, but it’s not merely a special case of that problem. Rather, the fact that late-term fetuses have a mental life of their own makes the Problem of Pregnant Thinkers, as I will call it, a sui generis and especially recalcitrant problem. (shrink)

This book is an introduction to elementary logic (classical propositional and first-order logic), comprising brief summaries of the basics of elementary logic, with the emphasis on typical questions and procedure descriptions and with a large number of corresponding exercises and problems. Solutions are given for each problem and exercise, often with commentaries. The first part, Basics of Logic, deals with (a) formal language, models, Venn diagrams for sentences, and translation from natural into formal language and vice versa, (b) deduction and (...) refutation methods in the format of natural deduction (Fitch and Suppes-Lemmon styles), tableau system and Venn diagrams, and (c) basic logical properties and relations (consistency, validity, consequence, equivalence, various types of opposition, logical completeness and independency, relationship between syntax and semantics). The second part, Logic in Understanding and Analysis, introduces into (a) logical approach to problem solving in concrete situations and events as presented in brief tales and anecdotes, (b) discovering the meaning, and reconstruction of logical interconnections, in ordinary, scholarly and philosophical texts, (c) application of already mastered logical tools in examining and defining further theoretical (logical, scientific) concepts and in building formal languages. The shorter third part, From the Traditional Logic, is dedicated to the traditional logic of concepts, judgements and syllogisms, largely with the use of Venn diagrams. (shrink)

Conventionalism about personal identity over time is the view that personal identity is in some sense dependent on our beliefs, desires, social practices, or language use (collectively: on our “conventions”). This paper provides an opinionated survey of the state of the art about personal identity conventionalism. First, it offers a taxonomy of possible types of conventionalism along four different axes and discusses weak vs. strong, private vs. public, doxastic vs. non-doxastic, and realizer-relative vs. assessor-relative varieties of conventionalism. Second, it reviews (...) the main sources of motivation for conventionalism about personal identity: methodological, epistemological, and normative motivations. Third, it maps out the place of conventionalism in logical space and distinguishes it from related philosophical theses: personal identity pluralism, indeterminacy about personal identity, revisionism, and self-concern relativism. Finally, some potential avenues for future research are considered. (shrink)

Many philosophers embrace grounding, supposedly a central notion of metaphysics. Grounding is widely assumed to be irreflexive, but recently a number of authors have questioned this assumption: according to them, it is at least possible that some facts ground themselves. The primary purpose of this paper is to problematize the notion of self-grounding through the theoretical roles usually assigned to grounding. The literature typically characterizes grounding as at least playing two central theoretical roles: a structuring role and an explanatory role. (...) Once we carefully spell out what playing these roles includes, however, we find that any notion of grounding that isn’t irreflexive fails to play these roles when they are interpreted narrowly, and is redundant for playing them when they are interpreted more broadly. The upshot is that no useful notion of grounding can allow a fact to ground itself. (shrink)

Several philosophers have developed theological perspectives out of Heidegger's ontology. Yet the question of God in Heidegger's thought itself has never received full elucidation. In this revealing new study, George Kovacs poses the problem of analyzing the idea of God as a process of questioning and thus subjects Heidegger's phenomenological existentialism to a process of exposition Heidegger himself employed.

The Question of Iterated Grounding (QIG) asks what grounds the grounding facts. Although the question received a lot of attention in the past few years, it is usually discussed independently of another important issue: the connection between metaphysical explanation and the relation or relations that supposedly “back” it. I will show that once we get clear on the distinction between metaphysical explanation and the relation(s) backing it, we can distinguish no fewer than four questions lumped under QIG. I will also (...) argue that given some plausible assumptions about what it would take for a relation to back metaphysical explanation, many salient views about grounding allow us to give “easy” answers to these questions—easy in the sense that we can straightforwardly derive them from the respective conception of grounding without getting into the sorts of complexities that typically inform answers to QIG. The paper's main upshot is that we cannot expect to make much progress on QIG without first addressing the difficult issue of how exactly grounding is related to metaphysical explanation. (shrink)

This paper is about what I call the Question of Iterated Causation (QIC): for any instance of causation in which c1…ck cause effect e, what are the causes of c1…ck’s causing of e? In short: what causes instances of causation or, as I will refer to these instances, the “causal goings‐on”? A natural response (which I call “dismissivism”) is that this is a bad question because causal goings‐on aren’t apt to be caused. After rebutting several versions of dismissivism, I consider (...) the view that QIC, though not illegitimate, is easy to answer: the causal goings‐on are apt to be caused but are plainly uncaused (“brutism”). However, I will argue that brutism too has a serious problem: namely, it leads to a highly implausible kind of armchair indeterminism. Next I consider some substantive candidate answers to QIC, none of which, I argue, is particularly promising. The paper’s final conclusion is twofold: QIC is at least as difficult as the more well‐known Question of Iterated Grounding; moreover, the largely overlooked regress problem that it raises gives us at least some defeasible reason to avoid causation in theory‐building. (shrink)

In recent years, metaphysics has undergone what some describe as a revolution: it has become standard to understand a vast array of questions as questions about grounding, a metaphysical notion of determination. Why should we believe in grounding, though? Supporters of the revolution often gesture at what I call the Argument from Explanatoriness: the notion of grounding is somehow indispensable to a metaphysical type of explanation. I challenge this argument and along the way develop a “reactionary” view, according to which (...) there is no interesting sense in which the notion of grounding is explanatorily indispensable. I begin with a distinction between two conceptions of grounding, a distinction which extant critiques of the revolution have usually failed to take into consideration: grounding qua that which underlies metaphysical explanation and grounding qua metaphysical explanation itself. Accordingly, I distinguish between two versions of the Argument from Explanatoriness: the Unexplained Explanations Version for the first conception of grounding, and the Expressive Power Version for the second. The paper’s conclusion is that no version of the Argument from Explanatoriness is successful. (shrink)

This research investigates consumers'' perceptions of claims made in Dial-a-Porn commercials. The empirical findings support the view that some of the claims are deceptive. Based on research findings, preliminary public policy guidelines are suggested.

Recent break-throughs in surgery and the discovery of an effective immunosupressive drug called cyclosporin, have brought a Renaissance in organ transplants. These medical advances have also heightened concern over the already critical shortage of body organs. Several alternatives have been suggested which may help alleviate the organ shortage. One such alternative is to allow commerce in human organs. This article discusses the morality of commercialization of human organs within the framework of several ethical theories.

This paper is a response to "The Customer Is Not Always Right" published in the November, 1994 issue of this Journal (Sorell, 1994). The authors argue that "The Customer Is Not Always Right" ignores significant contributions from the literature of business and economics. This comment refutes Sorell's arguments on a case by case basis showing why in each situation the customer is, in reality, right or the situation is not a question of the customer being right or wrong. Existing knowledge (...) from economics and marketing is shown to provide richer, more parsimonious explanations and answers to the problems and dilemmas posed by Sorell. (shrink)

The first part of the article analyses the imaginary of the characteristics and form of society as developed in early modern liberal political philosophy, especially by John Locke and Thomas Paine. It uses different contemporary receptions of the key authors of this tradition, namely the liberal reception of John Keane, which emphasizes the theoretical distinction between civil society and the state, the materialist reception of Ellen Meiksins Wood, which contextualizes political ideas in the political struggles and class interests of the (...) time, and the reception of Foucault, which focuses on the development of biopolitical governmentality. The article finds that the liberal tradition imagined society as a given and self-regulating sphere that does not require interference from the state. A socio-historical presupposition of this imaginary was the economic sovereignty of individuals, and it overlooked the relations of domination and exploitation. In its second part, the article presents Hannah Arendt’s critical concept of society. She did not conceptualize society as a given totality and in a spatial way, but used it as a qualifier of a specific, impoverished mode of being, in particular to analyse the situation and perspective of minorities. (shrink)

"Voyager ou découvrir est une aspiration majeure de l'homme. Diderot est toutefois sceptique sur l'utilité des voyages et sur la crédibilité des récits de voyageurs déjà dans ses premières oeuvres de fiction et dans les articles des premiers tomes de l'Encyclopédie. Vivre en voyage perpétuel signifie vivre en marge. De plus, l'incitation au voyage est le résultat de passions souvent nuisibles. Cette réflexion s'amplifie au fil de l'oeuvre de Diderot et surtout dans ses contributions à l'Histoire des deux Indes. Le (...) désir de voyager apparaît comme un motif néfaste pour l'humanité qui déclenche dans une certaine mesure le colonialisme. Pourtant l'enthousiasme se mêle parfois à la critique : le voyage de Diderot en Hollande et à Saint-Pétersbourg marque sa pensée politique. Ce livre tente de faire la synthèse de cette problématique dans l'oeuvre de Diderot, allant de la fiction vers le discours philosophique et politique de la dernière décennie de sa vie."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Supervenience is necessary co-variation between two sets of entities. In the good old days, supervenience was considered a useful philosophical tool with a wide range of applications in the philosophy of mind, metaethics, epistemology, and elsewhere. In recent years, however, supervenience has fallen out of favor, giving place to grounding, realization, and other, more metaphysically “meaty”, notions. The emerging consensus is that there are principled reasons for which explanatory theses cannot be captured in terms of supervenience, or as the slogan (...) goes: “Supervenience Is Nonexplanatory”. While SIN is widely endorsed, it is far from clear what it amounts to and why we should believe it. In this paper, I will distinguish various theses that could be meant by it, and will argue that none of them is both interesting and plausible: on some interpretations of ‘explanatory’, we have no reason to believe that supervenience is unexplanatory, while on other interpretations, supervenience is indeed unexplanatory, but widely accepted textbook cases of explanatory relations come out as unexplanatory, too. This result raises doubts as to whether there is any interesting sense in which SIN is true, and suggests that the contemporary consensus about supervenience is mistaken. (shrink)

Contemporary medicine views health as the individual’s physical, mental, and social well-being. Oral health plays a crucial role in one’s well-being, as the oral cavity and its surrounding regions execute essential functions in verbal and nonverbal communication, sensing, digestion, and significantly contribute to aesthetic appearance. The multifaceted nature of the notion of oral health, as well as the patient’s needs and autonomous will result in various treatment options for the same oral state, favouring often contrasting ethical values and different aspects (...) of oral health. The objective of this article is to suggest alternative treatment strategies in dentistry with respect to the following factors: extent of rehabilitation, preserving one’s anatomical structures, aesthetic outcome, number of sessions, patient autonomy. Additionally, this article describes the suggested treatment strategies in an ethical context and determines the conditions of their employment. The suggested treatment strategies are divided in two categories, extensive treatment strategies focusing on the patient’s entire craniofacial complex, while specific treatment strategies focus on specific paramount issues. (shrink)

This paper develops the Diachronic Self-Making View, the view that we are the non-accidentally best candidate referents of our ‘I’-beliefs. A formulation and defence of DSV is followed by an overview of its treatment of familiar puzzle cases about personal identity. The rest of the paper focuses on a challenge to DSV, the Puzzle of Inconstant ‘I’-beliefs: the view appears to force on us inconsistent verdicts about personal identity in cases that we would naturally describe as changes in one’s de (...) se beliefs. To solve this problem, the paper defends the possibility of overlapping people, and addresses a number of objections to this idea. (shrink)

The inevitable global marketplace creates a need for freer movement of labor. The question is not whether this movement will occur but how it will be implemented. This paper discusses the idea of selling citizenship rights as an alternative approach for allocating immigration and permanent residency. First presented is the rationale for using the market approach to selling citizenship. Next the political, country image, economic, and ethical implementation issues of the proposal are discussed. And last, selling citizenship is discussed in (...) terms of ethical theory and frameworks. (shrink)

Quantitative information is one of the means used to interface science with policy. As a consequence, much effort is invested in producing quantitative information for policy and much criticism is directed toward the use of numbers in policy. In this paper, I analyze five approaches drawn from such criticisms and propose alternative uses of quantitative information for governance: valuation of ecosystem services, social multicriteria evaluation, quantification of uncertainty through the Numeral, Unit, Spread, Assessment, Pedigree approach, Quantitative Story-Telling, and the heuristic (...) use of statistics. The analysis shows the varied ways that numbers are conceptualized and how different conceptualizations matter for the science–policy interface. Alternative conceptualizations of numbers are used to challenge the model of science-speaking truth to power. Uncertainty, complexity, pluralism, malpractice, and values are mobilized to redefine the relations between science and policy. Alternative quantification may produce alternative facts, but reflexive approaches that use numbers to discuss the relevance of equity, positionality, and quality in science for policy may offer a remedy. (shrink)

In a series papers, Jonathan Schaffer defended priority monism, the thesis that the cosmos is the only fundamental material object, on which all other objects depend. A primitive notion of dependence plays a crucial role in Schaffer’s argu- ments for priority monism. The goal of this paper is to scrutinize this notion and also to shed new light on what is at stake in the debate. I present three familiar arguments for priority monism and point out that each relies on (...) a connecting principle that ties dependence to other metaphysical relations. I then argue for two desiderata: the relation between dependence and other metaphysical relations needs to be strong enough to establish that other metaphysical relations are relevant to the direction of dependence but not so strong as to leave no room for revisionary versions of priority monism. I propose a particular way of meeting these desiderata, according to which the target notion of dependence is graded rather than all-or-nothing. One upshot is that we should be less preoccupied with priority monism itself and should instead focus on specific aspects of a broader monistic worldview. (shrink)

When an entity ontologically depends on another entity, the former ‘presupposes’ or ‘requires’ the latter in some metaphysical sense. This paper defends a novel view, Dependence Deflationism, according to which ontological dependence is what I call an aggregative cluster concept: a concept which can be understood, but not fully analysed, as a ‘weighted total’ of constructive and modal relations. The view has several benefits: it accounts for clear cases of ontological dependence as well as the source of disagreement in controversial (...) ones; it gives a nice story about the evidential relevance of modal, mereological and set-theoretic facts to ontological dependence; and it makes sense of debates over the relation's formal properties. One important upshot of the deflationary account is that questions of ontological dependence are generally less deep and less interesting than usually thought. (shrink)

_The Collision of Science with the Question of Be-ing in Heidegger’s Thinking_ Science does not lead to the full, final, truly in-depth exploration of beings; it leaves unresolved (unclarified) the understanding of being; it does not think through the question of being, of the “to be”, of the “is”; it does not think being as such; it adopts a metaphysical idea of being as being of beings (as one, the highest of beings). As this study shows, being is not within (...) the range of merely scientific investigation. Many philosophical questions (e. g., the foundation of the sciences; the understanding of the ontological difference) go beyond and transcend the reach of scientific inquiry. The collision of science with the question of being, with the question of the “to be”, comes from science attempting to move beyond its intrinsic limitations and boundary. According to Heidegger’s be-ing-historical thinking, scientific inquiry cannot resolve the question of the “to be” and that of the truth of the “to be”; it cannot eliminate (suppress) these distinctly philosophical concerns. Science cannot become a substitute for philosophy. As this study indicates, the understanding of the danger of the “collision” identified contributes to its prevention and to a creative interaction between science and philosophy. (shrink)

We describe a KB Gödelian ontological system, and some other weak systems, in a fully formal way using theory of types and natural deduction, and present a completeness proof in its main and specific parts. We technically and philosophically analyze and comment on the systems (mainly with respect to the relativism of values) and include a sketch of some connected aspects of Gödel's relation to Kant.

The Problem of Too Many Thinkers is the result, implied by several “permissive” ontologies, that we spatiotemporally overlap with a number of intrinsically person-like entities. The problem, as usually formulated, leaves open a much-neglected question: do we literally share our mental lives, i.e. each of our mental states, with these person-like entities, or do we instead enjoy mental lives that are qualitatively indistinguishable but numerically distinct from theirs? The latter option raises the worry that there is an additional Problem of (...) Too Many Mental Tokens. This paper argues that there is indeed such a problem, at least in fission cases. In the course of articulating this problem, we will make a number of surprising discoveries about the relationship between personal persistence and the metaphysics of mental entities. We will also see that the Problem of Too Many Mental Tokens has significant epistemological and ethical implications, which will haunt us even once we have addressed the Problem of Too Many Thinkers. (shrink)

Revisionary ontologies seem to go against our common sense convictions about which material objects exist. These views face the so-called Problem of Reasonableness: they have to explain why reasonable people don’t seem to accept the true ontology. Most approaches to this problem treat the mismatch between the ontological truth and ordinary belief as superficial or not even real. By contrast, I propose what I call the “uncompromising solution”. First, I argue that our beliefs about material objects were influenced by evolutionary (...) forces that were independent of the ontological truth. Second, I draw an analogy between the Problem of Reasonableness and the New Evil Demon Problem and argue that the revisionary ontologist can always find a positive epistemic status to characterize ordinary people’s beliefs about material objects. Finally, I address the worry that the evolutionary component of my story also threatens to undermine the best arguments for revisionary ontologies. (shrink)

According to Humeanism about the laws, the laws of nature are nothing over and above certain kinds of regularities about particular facts. Humeanism has often been accused of circularity: according to scientific practice laws often explain their instances, but on the Humean view they also reduce to the mosaic, which includes those instances. In this paper I formulate the circularity problem in a way that avoids a number of controversial assumptions routinely taken for granted in the literature, and against which (...) many extant responses are therefore ineffective. I then propose a solution that denies the alleged Humean commitment that laws are explained by their instances. The solution satisfies three desiderata that other solutions don’t: it provides independent motivation against the idea that Humean laws are explained by their instances; it specifies the sense in which Humean laws are nonetheless “nothing over and above” their instances; and it gives an alternative account of what does explain the laws, if not their instances. This solution, I will argue, is not only the simplest but also the oldest one: it appeals only to tools and theses whose first appearance predates the earliest statements of the circularity problem itself. (shrink)

Codes of ethics abound in science, but the question of why such codes should be obeyed is rarely asked. Various reasons for obeying a professional code have been proposed, but all are unsatisfactory in that they do not really motivate behavior. This article suggests that the long forgotten virtue of reverence provides both a reason to obey a professional code and motivation to do so. In addition, it discusses the importance of reverence as a cardinal virtue for scientists drawing on (...) the ideas of Paul Woodruff on the role of virtue in community. (shrink)