Inclusion of the humanities in undergraduate medicine curricula remains controversial. Skeptics have placed the burden of proof of effectiveness upon the shoulders of advocates, but this may lead to pursuing measurement of the immeasurable, deflecting attention away from the more pressing task of defining what we mean by the humanities in medicine. While humanities input can offer a fundamental critical counterweight to a potentially reductive biomedical science education, a new wave of thinking suggests that the kinds of arts and humanities (...) currently used in medical education are neither radical nor critical enough to have a deep effect on students’ learning and may need to be reformulated. The humanities can certainly educate for tolerance of ambiguity as a basis to learning democratic habits for contemporary team-based clinical work. William Empson’s ‘seven types of ambiguity’ model for analyzing poetry is transposed to medical education to: (a) formulate seven values proffered by the humanities for improving medical education; (b) offer seven ways of measuring impact of medical humanities provision, thereby reducing ambiguity; and (c) --as a counterweight to (b) – celebrate seven types of ambiguity in contemporary medical humanities that critically reconsider issues of proof of impact. (shrink)

The British have often denied the very existence of a tradition of English literary theory. George Watson redeems that denial in his latest book, the first study of 20th Century English theory. The book begins with Yeats, Pound and Eliot, who made England their home. In subsequent chapters, based on personal recollection as well as published sources, it assesses the contribution of I.A. Richards, William Empson, F.R. Leavis, C.S. Lewis, Isaiah Berlin and Wittgenstein, as well as Marxists like E.P. (...) Thompson and Raymond Williams. English literary theory is a tradition that has suffered in reputation, paradoxically, by the sheer fertility of its invention. In this seminal work the author celebrates that fertility from the First World War downto the death of Iris Murdoch in 1999, showing that England pioneered the academic study of theories of literature years in advance of France or the USA. (shrink)

Burke approaches man in terms of human actions. His key concepts--elucidated at length in A Grammar of Motives --are act, scene, agent, agency, and purpose. Men are viewed as agents acting in a scene and using some agency for the accomplishment of some purpose. This is a "field" orientation of the sort found in George H. Mead's "philosophy of the act," in Edward C. Tolman's "purposive behaviorism," and in Talcott Parson's concept of "action-system." Burke makes many references to Mead, and (...) his approach to man is very similar to Mead's in its stress upon the act, upon man as a symbol-using agent, and upon the forms of "identification" which role-taking makes possible. The focus of Burke's attention is, however, upon man's literary products as a mirror in which to behold the forms and complexity of human motivation. He is in effect telling us--and showing us--the importance of the study of man's most complex symbolic acts as a way of enriching our understanding of human nature. In the Rhetoric, humanistic material is penetratingly analysed in a way which supplements and broadens the conception of man gained from more narrowly scientific studies. In his discussion of the range and the principles of rhetoric Burke considers Cicero, Aristotle, Augustine, Bacon, Bentham, Marx, Carlyle, Empson, Veblen, Diderot, La Rochefoucauld, De Gourmont, Pascal, Ovid, Machiavelli, and Dante. Of his analyses of literary works the pages on Castiglione, Shakespere, Kafka, and Kierkegaard are very fine. That no student of man should neglect this humanistic material or this mode of linguistic analysis is convincingly attested by Burke's achievements. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content: Reviewed by Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers by Brian C. Ribeiro Donald C. Ainslie Brian C. Ribeiro. Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers. Brill: Leiden, 2021. Pp. 165. Hardback, $154.00. Brian C. Ribeiro’s Sextus, Montaigne, Hume: Pyrrhonizers is a charming and quirky investigation of his three titular skeptics. It is perhaps best understood as a skeptical investigation of skepticism. By that I mean that, like a good Pyrrhonist, Ribeiro explains how (...) things appear to him without claiming to lay down a doctrine or dogma. His topic is how and why skepticism still matters (7). And he suggests that those who are moved by skeptical arguments can learn intellectual modesty from them and thereby achieve a degree of philosophical “calmness of soul” (141).Ribeiro approaches his three figures by taking the cogency of their skeptical arguments for granted. There is little investigation of why these philosophers call various beliefs into question, and his concern is rather what remains once the skeptical doubts are taken on board. Because what he calls “Pyrrhonizing” philosophers reveal that large swaths of our beliefs lack epistemic merit, they also show us how we are not fully rational creatures in our everyday lives. In the case of Sextus, Ribeiro’s focus is on the famous question of whether skeptics can live their skepticism once they have actually suspended all belief. With Sextus, as with Montaigne and Hume, Ribeiro opts for the more radical of the interpretive options; he is not persuaded by Michael Frede’s suggestion that Pyrrhonists restrict their suspension only to abstruse matters, not the everyday (51). But even if we follow the “four-fold way” (20–23) that Sextus offers us as guides for life—the directives of nature, feelings, custom, and expertise—Ribeiro still thinks we will inevitably fall back into belief. He concludes that the original Pyrrhonists should be read aspirationally: insofar as we develop our capacities [End Page 517] to argue on both sides of every question and thus are able to suspend judgment, to that extent we will achieve tranquility. In the case of Montaigne, Ribeiro focuses on his Christian fideism. Once he recognizes the incapacity of reason to resolve intellectual problems, he falls back on faith. And Ribeiro argues that the Catholic flavor of this faith is simply a reflection of Montaigne’s surroundings. In a different community, he could just as easily have embraced a different faith. The heart of the book concerns Hume, whom Ribeiro discusses in three chapters, as opposed to the one each devoted to Sextus and Montaigne. In keeping with his interpretive preferences, Ribeiro’s Hume is a radical skeptic, though he acknowledges the significant yet “utterly perplexing” (95n22) naturalist strains that are also present. Ribeiro takes the resulting tension to be insoluble (98), though I was not convinced. Consider that, in both the Treatise and the Enquiry, Hume uses causal reasoning to investigate causal reasoning. He learns that our ideas are caused by prior impressions; that repeated experience of conjoint events causes us to associate our ideas of similar events; and so on. In the Treatise, he concludes the argument that association is at the root of such causal reasoning by presenting a set of rules, a “logic,” for it. The argument is not as such skeptical, though when Hume “recasts” it in the first Enquiry, he does so in terms of “sceptical doubts” and a “sceptical solution.” In the Treatise, “total” and “extravagant” skepticism come into play only as “systems of philosophy” that Hume uses to shed light on his own core commitments. The problem, I think, is that Ribeiro tends to read Hume a little too literally, as if he is himself falling prey to the skeptical upheaval of the conclusion to the first book of the Treatise, or the final section of the first Enquiry. But I would suggest that Hume is rather deploying the rhetoric of skepticism in these discussions, using it for his ultimate philosophical ends (a point that is especially clear in Ribeiro’s favorite of Hume’s works, the Dialogues). He is showing his reader how his naturalistic philosophical project is itself rooted in human nature, and thus does not yield insight into the intrinsic structure of... (shrink)

An adequate theory of rights ought to forbid the harming of animals to promote trivial interests of humans, as is often done in the animal-user industries. But what should the rights view say about situations in which harming some animals is necessary to prevent intolerable injustices to other animals? I develop an account of respectful treatment on which, under certain conditions, it’s justified to intentionally harm some individuals to prevent serious harm to others. This can be compatible with recognizing the (...) inherent value of the ones who are harmed. My theory has important implications for contemporary moral issues in nonhuman animal ethics, such as the development of cultured meat and animal research. (shrink)

This article discusses two complementary themes that play an important role in contemporary South African political philosophy: (1) the racist tradition in Western philosophy; and (2) the role of ubuntu in regaining an authentic African identity, which was systematically suppressed during the colonial past and apartheid. These are also leading themes in Mogobe Ramose’s African Philosophy Through Ubuntu. The first part concentrates on John Locke. It discusses the thesis that the reprehensible racism of many founders of liberal political philosophy has (...) lethally infected liberal theory. This view neglects the distinction between genesis and justification. Political liberalism has since cleansed itself of the prejudices of its spiritual ancestors. Liberal human rights exclude racism as a matter of principle. The second part discusses the claim that the ubuntu philosophy provides a better basis for a constitution in a modern society than political liberalism. A major problem is that ubuntu is an essentially contested concept. Some philosophers consider ubuntu to be a moribund notion (Matolino); others see it as a vital concept par excellence. In the latter case, it is elaborated from sundry incompatible political views, ranging from African nationalism (Ramose) via humanist communitarianism (Metz) to liberalism (Mboti). Conclusion: as an essentially contested ideological concept, ubuntu should not be a decisive constitutional standard for the application of state force. In contrast, the constitutional model of political liberalism provides a reasonable alternative, as it is designed precisely to solve the problem of social plurality and ideological contest. (shrink)

It is common for conservationists to refer to non-native species that have undesirable impacts on humans as “invasive”. We argue that the classification of any species as “invasive” constitutes wrongful discrimination. Moreover, we argue that its being wrong to categorize a species as invasive is perfectly compatible with it being morally permissible to kill animals—assuming that conservationists “kill equally”. It simply is not compatible with the double standard that conservationists tend to employ in their decisions about who lives and who (...) dies. (shrink)

C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students in order to discover how people experience evil -- in themselves, in others, and in ...

This paper proposes a biosemiotic conception of theories, as non-intentional organic theories, which is based on an analysis and comparison of philosopher Norwood Russell Hanson’s account of theories and zoologist Jakob von Uexküll’s theory of organisms. It is argued that Hanson’s proposals about scientific theories and their relation to observation are semiotic in nature and that there exists a correspondence between Hanson’s depiction of the relationship between theories, observation, and reality and von Uexküll’s views on the relationship between organisms and (...) their environments. This correspondence supports an account of theories that depicts them as organic extensions of our perceptual physiology. Among the epistemological consequences of this account are the following: The kind of correspondence that is established through theories between a subject and reality is related rather to a subject’s actions than to a faithful representation of every aspect of the world, it suggests a strong emphasis on the creative aspects of knowledge acquisition, and it urges a reassessment of the evolutionary epistemology of theories. (shrink)

(Statement of Responsibility) by C.A. Stephens ; illustrated.

C A Wringe; Reply to Antony Flew, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 149–158, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9752.1979.t.

Стаття С. Присухіна «Іван Павло ІІ про логіку діалогу між Католицькою Церквою та ісламом» присвячена філософськобогословським напрацюванням Папи Римського Івана Павла ІІ щодо аналізу змістовних характеристик поняття «діалог між католицизмом і ісламом», а також логіки його здійснення в непростому й суперечливому сьогоденні.

The US neutrino community gathered at the Workshop on the Intermediate Neutrino Program at Brookhaven National Laboratory February 4-6, 2015 to explore opportunities in neutrino physics over the next five to ten years. Scientists from particle, astroparticle and nuclear physics participated in the workshop. The workshop examined promising opportunities for neutrino physics in the intermediate term, including possible new small to mid-scale experiments, US contributions to large experiments, upgrades to existing experiments, R&D plans and theory. The workshop was organized into (...) two sets of parallel working group sessions, divided by physics topics and technology. Physics working groups covered topics on Sterile Neutrinos, Neutrino Mixing, Neutrino Interactions, Neutrino Properties and Astrophysical Neutrinos. Technology sessions were organized into Theory, Short-Baseline Accelerator Neutrinos, Reactor Neutrinos, Detector R&D and Source, Cyclotron and Meson Decay at Rest sessions.This report summarizes discussion and conclusions from the workshop. (shrink)

Maps and territory suggest problems which have to do with the opening of pathways in some poorly explored domain.

Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews (...) which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual. (shrink)

La réception tardive de l'oeuvre de Ernst Troeltsch en France nous a privés d'une analyse du christianisme originale et féconde. Elle nuance et enrichit ce que nous savons, au travers de la réflexion wébérienne notamment, des relations de la religion chrétienne à la modernité. Contre les interprétations usuelles qui datent l'émergence de cette dernière de la Renaissance et de la Réforme, Troeltsch insiste sur la centralité des Lumières comme marquant la fin de la civilisation ecclésiastique ; c'es l'évanouissement de la (...) référence structurante à l'ordre divin qui inau­gure selon lui l'entrée dans le monde moderne. Sur la base de ce constat, il s'agit pour Troeltsch de trouver une définition du christianisme qui soit en adéquation avec les conditions de l'existence moderne. Dans son ouvrage datant de 1912, « Les doctrines sociales des Églises et groupes chrétiens », il examine les types « Église », « secte » et « mystique » pré­sents depuis les origines évangéliques, circonscrivant trois modes socio­logiques et éthiques qu'il confronte à la modernité. Aucun n'est seul adéquat. Pour durer, le christianisme devra, selon Troeltsch, renoncer à la réalisation d'un programme éthique d'essence religieuse au sein du monde et accepter le cantonnement de la foi dans l'intimité des cons­ciences, tout en s'articulant à des réalités socio-culturelles à l'échelle de tous dont les formes et les transformations internes sont toujours à repenser.The delayed reception of the work of Ernst Troeltsch in France deprived us of an analysis of an original and fertile Christianity. It nuances and enriches what we know, especially through a Weberian reflection, about the relations of the Christian religion and modernity. Against the customary interpretations that date the emergence of the latter from the Renaissance and the Reformation, Troeltsch insists on the centrality of the Enlightenment as marking the end of an ecclesiastical civilization. It is the disappearance of the structuring reference to the divine order that inaugurated, according to him, the entrance to the modern world. On the basis of this observation, Troeltsch is interested in finding a definition of Christianity that would be in harmony with the conditions of modern existence. In his work dating from 1912, "The social doctrines of the Churches and Christian groups ", he examines the categories "Church", "sect", and "mystic" that were present evangelical times, circumscribing three sociological and ethical modes, which he confronts with modernity. No single one is adequate. In order to endure, Christian­ity should, according to Troeltsch, renounce the attempt to set up an ethical program of a religious essence in the heart of the world and accept the establishment of a faith in the intimacy of consciences, all the while adapting its« to socia-cultural realities applicable to everyone, of which the forms and internal transformations are always to be re-thought. (shrink)

The 65th year of a scholar who has devoted 40 years to editing and elucidating Robert Grosseteste provides us with a collection of essays. Not surprisingly, they emanate from colleagues and former students of Richard Dales and reflect his interest, among other concerns, in Grosseteste's aspectus et affectus - range of vision and disposition of mind - those twin peaks with which the 13th century thinker helped to get Christian thought through Aristotle without mutual destruction.

In Campbell Soup Co. v. Allstate Insurance Co. ), the United States District Court for the Western District of Michigan, Southern Division, held that a health plan's coordination of benefits clause, covered under the Employee Retirement Income Security Act, does not preempt a similar no-fault automobile insurance clause in the absence of irreconcilable conflict. The court found that ERISA's policy of shielding plans from unanticipated claims could only be furthered when the plan had expressly disavowed such claims. Because the ERISA (...) plan in this case did not specifically subordinate itself to the no-fault policy, the district court found that the no-fault COB clause controlled. However, to escape this ruling, ERISA plans need only redraft their COB clauses specifically to disclaim liability in case of conflict with provisions of no-fault insurance policies. This caveat substantially limits the scope of the court's ruling. (shrink)

Current literature suggesting a shared endophenotype between individuals with anorexia nervosa and autism spectrum disorder related to executive functioning has several limitations: performance-based instead of ecologically valid measures of set-shifting are used, lack of comparisons between same-sex groups, and reliance on adult samples only. This was the first study directly comparing female youth with ASD to female youth with AN using an ecologically valid measure of EF. A secondary data analysis combined caregiver-reported EF on the Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive (...) Functioning for 22 female adolescent youth with AN and 29 female adolescent youth with ASD. EF in each group was compared to population norms, and EF was compared between groups. Compared to population norms, adolescents with AN had elevated scores on shift, initiate, and emotional control scales, and adolescents with ASD had elevated scores on all scales of the BRIEF and were more likely to have scores in the clinical range. There were significant differences between groups on all but three scales. The cognitive profiles and clinical scores of AN females were not comparable to those of ASD females. The findings reveal a clear clinical impairment in females with ASD but not in females with AN. The results do not support the hypothesis of similar real-world EF profiles between these groups. The results encourage further exploration into the similarities and distinctions between these two disorders. (shrink)

On October 31, 1994, it was announced that a confidential settlement had been reached in Doe v. Kohn, Nast & Graf, P.C., et al., 862F. Supp. 1310 ). The settlement in ths widely publicized AIDS discrimination case came three weeks after the trial began in the District Court for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania, Nov. 2, 1994, at 10).Plaintiff Doe, an associate employed at Kohn, Nast & Graf, a prominent law firm in Philadelphia, filed an AIDS discrimination case under the (...) Americans with Disabilities Act against his employer claiming that the firm fired him in March 1993 because he was HIV-positive. Doe's complaint also cited claims under ERISA and other Pennsylvania employment laws. (shrink)

Lazare Carnot was the unique example in the history of science of someone who inadvertently owed the scientific recognition he eventually achieved to earlier political prominence. He and his son Sadi produced work that derived from their training as engineers and went largely unnoticed by physicists for a generation or more, even though their respective work introduced concepts that proved fundamental when taken up later by other hands. There was, moreover, a filial as well as substantive relation between the work (...) of father and son. Sadi applied to the functioning of heat engines the analysis that his father had developed in his study of the operation of ordinary machines. Specifically, Sadi's idea of a reversible process originated in the use his father made of geometric motions in the analysis of machines in general. (shrink)

Volume 1 of the Routledge History of Philosophy covers one of the most remarkable periods in human thought. The essays present the fundamental approaches and thinkers of Greek philosophy in chronological order.

This paper explores the evolution of the Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights , which was adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in 2005. While the draft UDBHR generated controversy among bioethicists, the process through which it evolved excluded mainstream bioethicists. The absence of peer review affects the declaration’s content and significance. This paper critically analyses its content, commenting on the failure to acknowledge socioeconomic and other factors that impede its implementation. The UDBHR outlines ideal (...) standards but fails to provide guidance that can be readily applied in different settings. It strives for universality but does not contribute to understanding of universal or global bioethics.The Universal Declaration on Bioethics and Human Rights was developed through multinational consultation over several years. It was officially adopted by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization in October 2005.1 This paper explores the process of drafting the UDBHR, critically analyses its content and considers its status in the context of global bioethics. It comments on the UDBHR’s failure to acknowledge or respond to socioeconomic and other factors that impede attempts to implement it. The paper concludes that the process of drafting the declaration excluded a necessary group of stakeholders and that the UDBHR therefore fails to provide the guidance it aims to offer.Identifying a need to develop universally applicable ethical guidelines within a context of cultural pluralism, Unesco began developing a draft Declaration on Universal Norms on Bioethics. A near final draft was posted on Unesco’s website in February 2005 and replaced in June 2005 with the version subsequently adopted as the UDBHR. Stakeholder consultation on the draft involved hundreds of people in many diverse nations. These were seemingly limited to consultations with Unesco affiliates, however, and public comment was not solicited. …. (shrink)

Describes the attempt of a medium "to bring the facts of other-world existence to the people of Mars." Giordano Bruno appears as one of a band of interplanetary spirits conducting the medium on her tour.--A. C. P.