In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Literature 25.2 (2001) 353-356 [Access article in PDF] Book Review The Metaphysical Club The Metaphysical Club, by Louis Menand; xii & 546 pp. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001, $27.00. "They didn't just want to keep the conversation going; they wanted to get to a better place" (p. 440). So much for the most prominent contemporary pragmatist, Richard Rorty, who remains unmentioned except in the acknowledgments. (...) That better place is participatory democracy (a phrase that does not appear in the book), which "means that everyone is equally in the game, but it also means that no one can opt out" (p. 441). The true name of the game is skeptical tolerance. There are no unquestionable duties or inalienable rights, no immutable natural laws, no absolute moral rules, no highest principles, no inherent virtues, no absolute standards, no stasis, no absolutely certain truth. There are no individual destinies, because the social comes before the individual, and the individual is embedded within and cannot exist without society. Scientific knowledge is always probabilistic, not necessarily because nature is indeterministic, but because we can never know enough to calculate its regularities if they exist. To wit, there are no Platonic Ideas or unchanging universals. All is change, nothing that happens is ever repeated, our general ideas and laws of nature are merely tools for getting along in the world. Above all, ideas do not refer to things, only to other ideas. What expedites our thinking is true. What expedites our acting is right. Whenever we act according to principle, rule, or law, we are making a bet that events will turn out the way [End Page 353] we think they will. If we keep this always in mind, we will never succumb to violence or war in the name of belief or principle. Whatever we believe, it could be otherwise. Such is a general summary of pragmatism as it has filtered down to the textbooks. It is (again befittingly) more or less accurate. The can-do American seeks out cash value in practical life.Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., William James, Charles Saunders Pierce, and John Dewey crafted the only indigenous philosophy that has so far been produced in America. Its roots are in Laplacean probability theory, Darwinian evolutionism, and Chauncey Wright's indeterminism. While James hoped to save a place for religion (if it works, go with it) and Pierce a place for God (he thought there had to be a designing intelligence to account for order), the pragmatic result is profoundly skeptical and secular. Neither Holmes nor Dewey thought that individuals imbedded in societies had any need of absolutes. Holmes said that people first decide on the basis of experience, then they deduce. Dewey said that people first behave commonsensically, then they rationalize.There is nothing as condensed as the above in Louis Menand's beautiful book on the ideas, personalities, and influence of Holmes, James, Pierce, and Dewey. I know of no clearer exposition of their ideas, and few biographers have made them come so alive. In particular, Menand's coverage of peripheral (but by no means insignificant) figures is very rich. He describes the development of graduate universities in America in detail from their autocratic beginnings to the institution of academic freedom as we know it today. University presidents, trustees, and administrators are presented luxuriously as the villains, and the professors gloriously as the heroes. Menand remarks with slight amazement that society bought the concept that professors were beholden to the public at large and not to the state or private university owners. He could have commented further on the fact that the concept of academic freedom has become virtually irrelevant in today's corporate research universities."It is a remarkable fact about the United States," Menand begins his book, "that it fought a civil war without undergoing a change in its form of government" (p. ix). This is a breathtaking fact, and I don't suppose Menand had any intent to explain it. "The Civil War swept away the slave civilization of the South, but it swept away almost the whole intellectual... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:UnbefriendedJean Watson“Can you be a friend to someone who needs one right now?”That probably wasn’t the question that our hospital clinical ethicist asked, though that is what I recall. It sounded like something my mother would encourage me to do. It sounded like something I would like to do. It sounded easy. It was none of that and so much more.Two weeks earlier, a man was found down (...) in his apartment, unresponsive. He had had a stroke. He was hospitalized in our ICU on a ventilator. He had no family or friends to speak on his behalf. Decisions needed to be made. Should he undergo surgery to place a tracheostomy and feeding tube to continue his life?The hospital hired a private investigator who performed yeoman’s work, trying to find someone who knew this man, someone who might be able to share information about his values so that we could act in accord with them. Remarkably, no one was found. The patient had been retired from work for more than a decade. Though he rented an apartment, his landlord did not know him. No family was discovered. No friends came forward nor were identified. No medical records were uncovered. He had not seen a doctor or visited a clinic or hospital in the area until now. He was a solitary person, a human being without close relationships. His apartment was unkempt; beer bottles were strewn about the place.The clinical team requested an ethics consultation. Though the hospital does not have a formal policy for decision making at moments like these, our ethicist is well-versed in a variety of ways these circumstances are handled. Sometimes a treating physician functions as both the attending and a surrogate. This can be fraught with potential conflicts of interest. Unconscious bias could influence one’s thoughts about the value of a life and the cost to sustain it. Sometimes the attending provider presses on with therapies regardless of the likelihood of successful treatment. This choice fails to acknowledge individual autonomy. It fails to weigh the suffering required to live another day. It sidesteps the thorny issues that are discussed everyday between providers, patients, and loved ones.The ethicist gathered a group to serve as informal surrogates for this patient. Three of us agreed to act as friends and decision makers for this man, helping the treatment team determine next steps. The ethicist provided a few rules and much oversight.We met for a family conference. The intensivist and neurologist shared the diagnosis and treatment that the patient had received. They detailed information about the decisions that needed to be made. The patient’s nurse, the social worker, and the spiritual care intern attended the meeting to watch the proceedings and contribute to the discussion. We three, the patient’s friend group, were invited to ask questions. We had some.I am a hospitalist, an internist working in a hospital caring for patients. I have done this work for 25 years. I know the intensivist and the neurologist well. We have worked together, caring for many people over the years. My two surrogate partners were a nurse and a chaplain. The nurse had decades of professional experience, including in the intensive care unit. The chaplain was experienced in her work and comfortable with the challenges that arise in a hospital.The three of us had a robust discussion. I shared what most patients tell me when I ask about resuscitation status. “I don’t want to be kept alive on machines,” or “I don’t want to be a burden.” The ethicist gently reminded us that we were tasked with making a decision on behalf of this person, irrespective of what others would decide for themselves. It was challenging to tease out clues [End Page 10] that could guide us to what this man might choose for himself.Because of the location of his stroke, the patient was not expected to regain consciousness. He had been off sedation for more than a day and had not woken up. For the rest of his life, he would be institutionalized, ventilator dependent, and sustained with nutrition administered via a... (shrink)

This paper examines the content of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal exam (1980). Our report is not a statistical review. We find the content of this exam defective in a number of areas. The exam consists of five “tests” of 16 questions for a total of 80 questions. Of these, we cannot recommend test 1, test 2, test 4, and test 5; and, we cannot recommend questions 4, 5, 14, 16, 37, 45, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, and 67. (...) As shown in this report, the exam creates confusion and makes basic errors in critical thinking in a number of areas, and therefore, lacks content quality in these areas. Hence, no statistical results pertaining to the administration of these areas to students can be informative. We find the remaining areas acceptable as to content. But until the problems are corrected, we can only recommend that those who may use the exam remove the defective parts from test administration or from data collection and reporting. We recommend the former, because of the wasted time involved in the latter. This would amount to administering only 14 questions, i.e. test 3 with questions 37 and 45 eliminated.We also find the scope of the exam to be quite limited, but allow that this may be unavoidable for any instrument designed to be completed in about an hour. We further recommend the use of several tests, rather than one; and, that any such results be understood only as a measure of minimal competency (below which remediation likely is needed) for the skills tested, but not as an adequate measure of critical thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy by Susan JamesRichard A. WatsonSusan James. Passion and Action: The Emotions in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. vii + 318. Cloth, $35.00.Susan James shows how during the seventeenth century philosophers moved from the three souls of Aristotle and the tripartite soul of Thomas Aquinas in which passions and reasons compete for the attention of the will, (...) to a Cartesian view of man as a single soul in union with the body who wills under the influence of both passions and reasons, to a Hobbesian view that the soul is the body and that the bodily motions we call reasons and passions are desires; acts of will are merely the deciding desires in deterministic causal sequences of the material motions of the body that constitute desires. This sets up the contemporary view that, motions are caused by desires and beliefs, leaving behind the difficulties of integrating with one another Aristotelian souls, Thomistic faculties, and Cartesian mind and body. James conceives of this evolution as one of unification of mental and bodily powers, and of integration of the active and passive powers of the mind. This concourse also represents a development from theories meant to explain to theories calculated for control and finally to theories facilitating therapy. Aristotle and Thomas adapted their ontologies to perceived differences in powers and faculties, while Descartes and Hobbes worked toward an ideal of unity of science and nature. The Christian Descartes brought together all the substances and powers of nature under a single extended matter divided into parts by the single force of motion, but he excepted the human soul with its power of will to alter the course of nature. The atheist Hobbes simply dispensed with supernatural [End Page 168] mental substance and occult power of will in order to integrate the whole of nature (including sensing and reasoning) under a cause and effect sequence of moving material bodies in which the last desire in a sequence of human bodily motions is designated as an act of will.James intends her book “as a contribution to the reinstatement of the emotions within philosophy, to the… opinion that we need to take account of our emotional life if we are to understand… moral motivation and growth, the springs of action (rational and otherwise), and the nature of reasoning” (22). She agrees that the sharp division between ideas and passions or emotions is properly abolished to be replaced by the view that all ideas have an emotional component, and all passions an ideational component. This fits with the parallel development of the notion that all sensible perceptions are propositional, and the somewhat less widespread notion that all concepts have a sensible component.But did this development result in a view of passions and ideas, learning and knowing, thinking and action, that is more true to nature than Aristotelian ontology? It is very hard to answer this question, and despite her sympathies with the notion that all human thought is both conceptual and emotional, James does not try. The reason we don’t know lies under the surface of the movement from Aristotle to Hobbes (i.e., to Daniel Dennett) like a monster in the deep. The monster is the monotheistic God, the perfection and unity of which underlies the Western drive to a unitary view of nature including man. The possibility that this God could be a deceiver, and so all our sensations and ideas might not represent the real world, set up Cartesianism and modern hypothetico-deductive science. But lurking throughout James’ book is a more palpable dreadnought, a demoness, the woman Eve. The female is responsible for the Fall of Man, and thus the fear and suspicion of women that suffuses patriarchic Christianity, and is expressed openly by such philosophers as Malebranche. Bodily passions and emotions (particularly the concupiscent ones) are nasty, evil, irrational, overpowering; to wit, they are feminine. They are not to be trusted, and must be subdued. So while still driven by ideals of monotheism, Descartes and Hobbes do move beyond the dogmatic Christian association of the emotions with female treachery. Even so... (shrink)

A long-standing theoretical tradition in clinical psychology and psychiatry sees deliberate self-harm , such as wrist-cutting, as “functional”—a means to avoid painful emotions, for example, or to elicit attention from others. There is substantial evidence that DSH serves these functions. Yet the specific links between self-harm and such functions remain obscure. Why don’t self-harmers use less destructive behaviors to blunt painful emotions or elicit attention? Economists and biologists have used game theory to show that, under certain circumstances, self-harmful behaviors by (...) economic agents and animals serve important strategic goals. In particular, “costly signals” can credibly reveal a “private state” in situations where verbal claims and other “cheap” signals might be disbelieved. Here, DSH is scrutinized using signaling theory, and a variant, the theory of bargaining with private information. The social contexts and associated features of DSH suggest that it might be a costly, and therefore credible, signal of need that compels social partners to respond. (shrink)

This paper examines the content of the Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal exam. (1980) Our report is not a statistical review. We find the content of this exam defective in a number of areas. The exam consists of five “tests” of 16 questions for a total of 80 questions. Of these, we cannot recommend test 1, test 2, test 4, and test 5; and, we cannot recommend questions 4, 5, 14, 16,37, 45, 60, 63, 64, 65, 66, and 67. As (...) shown in this report, the exam creates confusion and makes basic errors in critical thinking in a number of areas, and therefore, lacks content quality in these areas, Hence, no statistical results pertaining to the administration of these areas to students can be informative. We find the remaining areas acceptable as to content. But until the problems are corrected, we can only recommend that those who may use the exam remove the defective parts from test administration or from data collection and reporting. We recommend the former, because of the wasted time involved in the latter. This would amount to administering only 14 questions, i.e. test 3 with questions 37 and 45 eliminated.We also find the scope of the exam to be quite limited, but allow that this may be unavoidable for any instrument designed to be completed in about an hour. We further recommend the use of several tests, rather than one; and, that any such results be understood only as a measure of minimal competency (below which remediation likely is needed) for the skills tested, but not as an adequate measure of critical thinking. (shrink)

Gregory Chaitin has done seminal work on the foundations of mathematics, especially the meaning of randomness and undecidability. In Meta Maths, he offers his ideas in a new popular version, which has a special interest because it comes directly from their originator. Long associated with the IBM Watson Research Center, Chaitin comes across as a kind of mathematical Richard Feynman, intuitive and high-spirited, irreverent and plain-spoken. Through this jovial persona, he presents many serious ideas in an engagingly dishevelled way, (...) mixing autobiography and reminiscence with exposition and example. He presents his insights so agreeably that it all seems a grand lark. (shrink)

Sinnott, Nigel Review of: Worst words, by Don Watson with Helen Smith Sydney: Vintage Books, 2015. 439 pp., pbk., ISBN 978 0 85798 344 2.

Using data from American emergency call centers, this article focuses on the coordination, and mutual relevance, of participants’ effort to manage two forms of unit completion – sequence closing and concluding the occasion in which the project was pursued. In doing so, we specify the import of sequence organization as one method for conducting, organizing, and resolving interactional projects participants may be said to pursue, and describe a range of possible relations between project completion and occasion closure and the locations (...) from which problems come to be introduced as parties move to resolve projects and close calls. As we show, sequence and occasion closings produced in the service of projects are fateful: they inexorably demand that the participants arrive at some alignment – or make visible their failure to do so – regarding the projects pursued in it, the status of those projects, and thus who, as a consequence, the parties are for another, that is, their ‘identities’. For strangers and familiars both, the management of projects and the manner in which closing is achieved matters. (shrink)

The aim of this report is to consider feasible conditions under which South Africa!!" processed (e.g., canned and other packaged) fruit industry would be internationally competitive and a profitable site of investment, and therefore able to resume a pattern of growth from which it departed in the early part of the present decade. This is in service of the wider aim of identifying, in a subsequent phase of the project, appropriate industrial policy measures which Government might put in place to (...) assist the industry, in accordance with sound principles of national welfare optimization and public finance. (shrink)

This pioneering anthology of Middle English prologues and other excerpts from texts written between 1280 and 1520 is one of the largest collections of vernacular literary theory from the Middle Ages yet published and the first to focus attention on English literary theory before the sixteenth century. It edits, introduces, and glosses some sixty excerpts, all of which reflect on the problems and opportunities associated with writing in the "mother tongue" during a period of revolutionary change for the English language. (...) The excerpts fall into three groups, illustrating the strategies used by medieval writers to establish their cultural authority, the ways they constructed audiences and readerships, and the models they offered for the process of reading. Taken together, the excerpts show how vernacular texts reflected and contributed to the formation of class, gender, professional, and national identity. They open windows onto late medieval debates on women's and popular literacy, on the use of the vernacular for religious instruction or Bible translation, on the complex metaphorical associations contained within the idea of the vernacular, and on the cultural and political role of the "courtly" writing associated with Chaucer and his successors. Besides the excerpts, the book contains five essays that propose new definitions of medieval literary theory, discuss the politics of Middle English writing, the relation of medieval book production to notions of authorship, and the status of the prologue as a genre, and compare the role of the medieval vernacular to that of postcolonial literatures. The book includes a substantial glossary that constitutes the first mapping of the language and terms of Middle English literary theory. _The Idea of the Vernacular_ will be an invaluable asset not only to Middle English survey courses but to courses in English literary and cultural history and courses on the history of literary theory. (shrink)

For Socrates, philosophy is not like Christian conversion from error to truth, but rather it is like the pagan process whereby a young man is initiated into cult mysteries by a more experienced man - the mystagogos - who prepares him and leads him to the sacred precinct. In Greek cult religion, the mystagogos prepared the initiate for the esoteric mysteries revealed by the hierophant. Socrates treats traditional wisdom with scepticism, and this makes him appear ridiculous or dangerous in the (...) eyes of cultural conservatives. Nevertheless, his scepticism is not radical: custom is not something on which we must turn our backs if we are to pursue the truth. Socrates assumes an epistemology and employs a method by which he induces his companions to begin the critical and self-critical process of philosophical inquiry, not ignoring conventional wisdom, but thinking through and reinterpreting it as they make constructive progress towards the truth. He provides conclusive and convincing arguments in support of controversial answers to some of the most important moral questions he poses. (shrink)

What I suggest we can see in this brief overview of the literature is an extensive interpenetration on both sides of these debates between scientific, political, and social values. Important shifts in political and social values were of course occurring over the same period, some of them in parallel with, and perhaps even contributing to, these transitions I have been speaking of in evolutionary discourse. The developments that I think of as at least suggestive of possible parallels include the progressive (...) encroachment of public values into the private domain of post-World War II American life, the cold war, the rise of consumerism, and the flowering of what Christopher Lasch calls a “narcissistic individualism.”35 In popular language, the 1960s gave birth to the “me” generation. Perhaps the most tantalizing analogue is suggested by Barbara Ehrenreich's argument for the emergence of a new meaning of masculinity — an ideal of masculinity measured not by commitment, responsibility, or success as family provider, but precisely by the strength of a man's autonomy in the private sphere, his resistance to the demands of a hampering female.36 It is tempting to speculate about possible connections between changes in scientific discourse and developments in the social and political spheres, but such connections, however suggestive, would clearly have to be demonstrated.For now, however, I want to focus on another kind of change —a transformation not so much in the social or political sphere as in the scientific sphere. I make this turn, or return, in support of a more complex account of scientific change that incorporates reverberations within the scientific communty along with social and political changes.In the 1960s, all of biology was undergoing a major transformation in direct response to the dramatic successes of molecular biology. These successes seemed to completely vindicate the values on which the molecular revolution was premised — namely, simplicity and mechanism. Following the victory of Watson and Crick, and of others after them, the fever of that endeavor swept through biology leaving in its wake a new standard of science, and of scientific discourse — one predicated on clarity, simplicity, and analyzability; on the definition of legitimate questions as those capable of clear and unambiguous answers. Every biological discipline felt it — even evolutionary biology, which in some respects was at the furthest pole. Perhaps precisely because it seemed conceptually so remote, evolutionary biology may have felt it most of all. Lewontin inadvertently provides us with some direct support for this view. Indeed, he begins his introduction to Population Biology and Evolution with the following remarks: The twenty years since World War II have seen a vindication in biology of our faith in the Cartesian method as a way of doing science. Some of the most fundamental and interesting problems of biology have been solved or are very nearly solved by an analytic technique that is now loosely called “molecular biology.” But it is not specifically the “molecular” aspect of biology of the last twenty years that has led to its success. It is, rather, the analytic aspect, the belief that by breaking systems down into their component parts, by simplifying them or using simpler organisms, one can learn about more complex systems. As it happens, the problems that were attacked and are being attacked by this method lead to answers in terms of molecules and cell organelles.... There is a host of problems in biology, however, that has been much neglected in these twenty exciting years, because the answers to them cannot be meaningfully framed in molecular and cellular terms.37Lewontin is referring, of course, to problems in evolution. The remainder of his remarks is devoted to an argument for the applicability of the method, if not the content, of molecular biology to these problems. He writes, “It is not the case that molecular biology is Cartesian and analytic while population biology is holistic. Population biology is properly analytic and operates, within the framework of its own problems, by the process of simplification, analysis, and resynthesis.”38 With these remarks, he leads into the criticism of the “holists” who have “held up progress.”This new ethic of simplicity, clarity, and mechanism — embodying the very virtues lauded by Williams — was explicitly carried into evolutionary biology in the name of scientific progress. As it happened, the values implied also fit conveniently well with other values — each set of values providing crucial support for the other.However substantive the scientific gains may have been in some respects, the net effect of this ethic has also been a systematic “perceptual bias” — a bias with profound practical consequences for the entire program of methodological individualism in evolutionary biology, if not elsewhere as well. It may well be that the whole is equivalent to the reconstituted aggregate of its parts, if, in the process of aggregation or summation, all possible interactions among the parts are included. But if certain kinds of interactions are systematically excluded, our confidence in that program necessarily founders. My claim here is that such systematic exclusion does occur, and that it occurs on a number of different levels. To briefly review the interlocking kinds of “bias” that I see occurring in practice, I suggest the following schematic listing:On the most general level: The ethic of simplicity — the privileging of certain values, even certain methodologies, as having an a priori superior claim to scientific credibility.Only slightly less general, and crucially related, is the equation of “scientific” with “tractible”: Given the techniques of analysis available, the equation of science with what we can do inevitably leads to a systematic technical bias favoring simplicity. That is, because we don't know how to model complex dynamics, nonlinear interactions are systematically biased against because of the limitations of our technical know-how. The consequences of this equation of the scientific with the tractible are greatly compounded by the additional equation between what we can do and what is — that is, by our temptation to confuse tractibility with reality.Finally, and also closely related, a further kind of elision occurs even within the confines of tractibility. This kind of elision — taking the form almost of inferring tractibility from one's prior assumptions of what is real — is exemplified by the history of a mathematical ecology of mutualism. Even when mutualism can be introduced into the same technical machinery, it is still not pursued. The basic assumption is that competition is what is real, not because it is easier to model, but because it is what we expect. When the actual difficulties of modeling competition are then in turn suppressed, as in the Robert May story, what we have, given the temptation to equate the tractible with the real, is the possibility of a truly self-fulfilling prophecy. (shrink)

Twenty papers from a conference in Villanova, Pennsylvania discuss the politics, psychoanalysis and feminist theory, aesthetics, and ethics of phenomenology and existentialism in North America, from its beginnings in the 1940s to its ...

What makes teaching a moral endeavor? How can we prepare classroom practitioners for engaging in that moral endeavor in meaningful and effective ways? This volume brings together leading scholars who draw upon both their academic expertise and substantial wisdom of practice to offer a variety of perspectives on the challenge of preparing today’s teachers for the moral work of teaching. Book Features: Examines the role that teacher preparation and development can play in addressing the moral work of teaching. Highlights the (...) work of leading scholars from educational psychology, educational philosophy, and teacher education. Provides compelling insights for identifying the next generation of our nation’s best teachers. Contributors: Wolfgang Althof, Karen Benson, Marvin Berkowitz, Donald Blumenfeld-Jones, Elizabeth Campbell, Julie Canniff, Mary Crawford, Lana Daly, Rebecca Evers, Catherine Fallona, Gary Fenstermacher, Anthony Holter, Lisa Johnson, Daniel Lapsley, Darcia Narvaez, Virginia Navarro, Larry Nucci, Joy Pelton, Virginia Richardson, Don Senneville, David Light Shields, Barbara Stengel, Jonatha Vare, Marilyn Watson. (shrink)

A common philosophical account of expertise contends that (a) the good of expertise lies in the fact that it is grounded in reliably true beliefs or knowledge in a domain and (b) rejecting this truth-linked view threatens the authority of experts and opens one to epistemic relativism. I argue that both of these claims are implausible, and I show how epistemic authority and objectivity can be grounded in the current state of understanding and skill in a domain. Further, I argue (...) that what I call a ‘cognitive systems’ approach is consistent with this domain-linked account of expert authority, is empirically supported, and provides a philosophical foundation for both empirical and conceptual work on the nature and scope of expertise. (shrink)

A popular critique of the kalām cosmological argument is that one argument for its second premise illicitly assumes a finite starting point for the series of past temporal events, thereby begging the question against opponents. Rejecting this assumption, opponents say, eliminates any objections to the possibility that the past is infinitely old and undermines the IFA’s ability to support premise 2. I contend that the plausibility of this objection depends on ambiguities in extant formulations of the IFA and that we (...) may resolve these ambiguities in a way that does not presuppose a finite staring point. I also argue that this disambiguation allows us to construct an argument demonstrating that the concept of an infinite past entails a contradiction. (shrink)

as the chief novelty in the quantum description of nature, Einstein for having found vindication in 3 relativity theory for either positivism or realism, depending upon whom one asks. Famous as is each in his own domain, they are famous also, together, for their decades-long disagreement over the future of fundamental physics, their respective embrace and rejection of quantum indeterminacy being only the most widely-known point of contention.

We argue that the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities has endorsed a facilitation approach to clinical ethics consultation that asserts that bioethicists can offer moral recommendations that are well-grounded in bioethical consensus. We claim that the closest thing the field currently has to a citable, nationally endorsed bioethical consensus are the 22 Core References used to construct the questions for the Healthcare Ethics Consultant-Certified (HEC-C) exam. We acknowledge that the Core References reflect some important points of bioethical consensus, but (...) note they are unwieldy, repetitive, and sometimes inconsistent on important issues faced by clinical ethicists. In this article, we draw carefully qualified inspiration from the Ethical and Religious Directives for Catholic Health Care Services (ERDs) to argue for the creation of a concise, nationally endorsed bioethical consensus document on moral issues commonly faced in clinical ethics, what we call the Standardized Ethical Guidelines for Secular Health Care Services (SEGs). We observe that such a document would better meet the expectations of stakeholders, clinical ethicists, and their trainees who desire moral recommendations grounded in a clearly articulated bioethical consensus, and we defend the SEGs from some common objections. (shrink)

This book is a selection of papers from a conference which took place at the University of Keele in July 1982. The conference was an extraordinarily enjoyable one, and we would like to take this opportunity of thanking all participants for helping to make it so. The conference was intended to allow scholars working on different aspects of symbolic behaviour to compare findings, to look for common ground, and to identify differences between the various areas. We hope that it was (...) successful in these aims: the assiduous reader may judge for himself. Several themes emerged during the course of the conference. Some of these were: 1. There is a distinction to be made between those symbol systems which attempt, more or less directly, to represent a state of affairs in the world (e. g. language, drawing, map and navigational skill) and those in which the representational function is complemented, if not overshadowed, by properties of the symbol system itself, and the systematic inter-relations that symbols can have to one another (e. g. music, mathematics). The distinction is not absolute, for the nature of all symbolic skills is, in part, a function of the structure of the symbolic system employed. Nonetheless, this distinction helps us to understand some common acquisition difficulties, such as that experienced in mathematics, where mental manipulation of symbols can go awry if a child assumes too close a correspondence between mathematical symbols and the world they represent. 2. (shrink)

ABSTRACT: A popular response to proponents of embryonic stem cell research and advocates of abortion rights alike-summarized by claims such as “you came from an embryo!” or “you were a fetus once!”-enjoys a rich philosophical pedigree in the arguments of Hare, Marquis, and others. According to such arguments from potentiality, the prenatal human organism is morally valuable because every person’s biological history depends on having completed embryonic and fetal stages. In this article I set out the steps of the underlying (...) argument in light of how it has been cast in the philosophical literature and uncover an intriguingly illicit inference.RÉSUMÉ: On répond souvent aux avocats de la recherche sur les cellules souches et à ceux du droit a l’avortement par une argumentation qui se résume à des affirmations comme : «vous provenez d’un embryon!» ou «vous avez déjà été un fœtus!» -- ce genre de réponse appartient à une riche lignée philosophique qui inclut les arguments de Hare, Marquis et d’autres encore. Selon ces arguments fondés sur la potentialité, l’organisme humain prénatal possède une valeur morale parce que l’histoire biologique de chaque personne dépend de l’accomplissement des états embryonnaire et fœtal. Je présente ici les étapes du raisonnement qui se trouve au fondement de cette argumentation telle qu’elle est formulée dans la littérature philosophique. J’y découvre une inférence curieusement invalide. (shrink)