... an act of compassion or of irresponsibility to make known publicly the esoteric teachings that previously used to be given privately by a teacher to a ...

It is a somewhat vexed question whether presuppositions are always accommodated into the global context of utterance of the sentence, or whether they may sometimes be accommodated into a local context - the context of some subsentential constituent. Von Fintel (2008) argues that there is no local accommodation. He shows that presuppositions in the scope of universally quantified sentences, which have traditionally been handled via local accommodation (eg Heim 1983), can be accounted for by assuming that conversational participants select a (...) domain of quantification such that every relevant element of it has the property required by the presupposition in the scope. It is shown that this domain selection mechanism cannot account for a related set of data involving presupposition triggers in the restrictor rather than scope of the universal. We also discuss the relationship between quantified sentences and conditionals, and general consequences for the theory of presupposition accommodation. (shrink)

The Demonic in the Political Thought of Eusebius of Caesarea explores how Eusebius of Caesarea's ideas about demons interacted with and helped to shape his thought on other topics, particularly political topics Hazel Johannessen builds on and complements recent work on early Christian and early modern demonology. Eusebius' political thought has long drawn the attention of scholars who have identified in some of his works the foundations of later Byzantine theories of kingship. However, Eusebius' political thought has not previously (...) been examined in the light of his views on demons. Moreover, despite frequent references to demons throughout many of Eusebius' works, there has been no comprehensive study of Eusebius' views on demons, until now, as expressed throughout a range of his works.The originality of this study lies both in an initial examination of Eusebius' views on demons and their place in his cosmology, and in the application of the insights derived from this to consideration of his political thought. As a result of this new perspective, Johannessen challenges scholars' traditional characterization of Eusebius as a triumphal optimist. Instead, she draws attention to his concerns about a continuing demonic threat, capable of disrupting humankind's salvation, and presents Eusebius as a more cautious figure than the one familiar to late antique scholarship. (shrink)

We relate Popper functions to regular and perfectly additive such non-Archimedean probability functions by means of a representation theorem: every such non-Archimedean probability function is infinitesimally close to some Popper function, and vice versa. We also show that regular and perfectly additive non-Archimedean probability functions can be given a lexicographic representation. Thus Popper functions, a specific kind of non-Archimedean probability functions, and lexicographic probability functions triangulate to the same place: they are in a good sense interchangeable.

What would the Merleau-Ponty of Phenomenology of Perception have thought of the use of his phenomenology in the cognitive sciences? This question raises the issue of Merleau-Ponty’s conception of the relationship between the sciences and philosophy, and of what he took the philosophical significance of his phenomenology to be. In this article I suggest an answer to this question through a discussion of certain claims made in connection to the “post-cognitivist” approach to cognitive science by Hubert Dreyfus, Shaun Gallagher and (...) Francisco Varela, Evan Thompson and Eleanor Rosch. I suggest that these claims are indicative of an appropriation of Merleau-Ponty’s thought that he would have welcomed as innovative science. Despite this, I argue that he would have viewed this use of his work as potentially occluding the full philosophical significance that he believed his phenomenological investigations to contain. (shrink)

Chloë G. K. Atkins, My Imaginary Illness: A Journey into Uncertainty and Prejudice in Medical Diagnosis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2010, reviewed by Frances R. Batzer.

Calls for the inclusion of women in clinical trials raise the obvious question: why have sponsors excluded them? The answer most often given is one tragically evocative word: Thalidomide. The tragedies of the children born with seal limbs because their mothers took this over-the-counter sleeping pill and cure for morning sickness showed that, contrary to previous perceptions, the placenta could not be depended upon to filter out toxins before they reached the fetus. The specter of birth defects spawned sponsors’ fears (...) of a variety of catastrophes which contributed to closing the doors of clinical trials for women.This paper will not argue that the possibility of birth defects arising from the ingestion of an experimental drug does not exist. Sadly, scientists do not yet have the ability to predict which drugs will cause birth defects. Rather, it will argue that case law does not provide a basis for sponsor liability when a woman gives informed consent and the regulations governing clinical trials are followed. (shrink)

This chapter compares simple predicates of personal taste (PPTs) such as tasty and beautiful with their complex counterparts (eg tastes good, looks beautiful). I argue that the former differ from the latter along two dimensions. Firstly, simple PPTs are individual-level predicates, whereas complex ones are stage-level. Secondly, covert Experiencer arguments of simple PPTs obligatorily receive a generic interpretation; by contrast, the covert Experiencer of a complex PPT can receive a generic, bound variable or referential interpretation. I provide an analysis of (...) these facts based on a novel proposal about the licensing of individual-level predicates (the ‘Licensing Condition on ILPs’). This condition states that all covert pronominal arguments of an individual-level predicate must be bound by the generic operator. Finally, I show that generic construal of the Experiencer is a necessary condition for faultless disagreement. This is evidence in favour of treatments of subjective meaning that appeal to genericity, and against relativism about PPTs. (shrink)

From time to time we explain what people do by referring to their habits. We explain somebody’s putting the kettle on in the morning as done through “force of habit”. We explain somebody’s missing a turning by saying that she carried straight on “out of habit”. And we explain somebody’s biting her nails as a manifestation of “a bad habit”. These are all examples of what will be referred to here as habit explanations. Roughly speaking, they explain by referring to (...) a pattern of a particular kind of behaviour which is regularly performed in characteristic circumstances, and has become automatic for that agent due to this repetition. (shrink)

My purpose in this essay is to describe and define the ways in which Afro-American women intellectuals, in the last decade of the nineteenth century, theorized about the possibilities and limits of patriarchal power through its manipulation of racialized and gendered social categories and practices. The essay is especially directed toward two academic constituencies: the practitioners of Afro-American cultural analysis and of feminist historiography and theory. The dialogue with each has its own peculiar form, characterized by its own specific history; (...) yet both groups are addressed in an assertion of difference, of alterity, and in a voice characterized by an anger dangerously self-restrained. For it is not in the nature of Caliban to curse; rather, like Caliban, the black woman has learned from her behaviour of her master and mistress that if accommodation results in a patronizing loosening of her bonds, liberation will be more painful. Hazel V. Carby is assistant professor of English at Wesleyan University. She is the coauthor of the Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in Seventies Britain and the author of Uplifting as They Write: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. (shrink)

AIDS has challenged many concepts and practices within nursing. Because of the serious implications attending a positive diagnosis, and because patients with AIDS have become articulate and well informed, familiar principles have been exposed to renewed scrutiny. Anomalies and dilemmas have been revealed. Results from a recent Institute of Medical Ethics survey carried out by the author have illustrated some of the theoretical concepts. Confidentiality has assumed new dimensions. Partnership and mutual empowerment are seen as keys to sound practice involving (...) the patient in decision-making. A vital ingredient relates to the preparation of professionals; they need to be aware of those attitudes and prejudices within themselves which potentially stand in the way of caring well. (shrink)

• Life sciences: Father was Macedonian court doctor; ¼ of surviving work on biology • Alienation: spent most of life as an exile in Athens; can’t be assumed to be naïve defender of status quo. • Plato: Worked with Plato at the Academy in Athens for 20 years; later formed the..

A hyperintensional semantics for natural language is proposed which is agnostic about the question of whether propositions are sets of worlds or worlds are sets of propositions. Montague’s theory of intensional senses is replaced by a weaker theory, written in standard classical higher-order logic, of fine-grained senses which are in a many-to-one correspondence with intensions; Montague’s theory can then be recovered from the proposed theory by identifying the type of propositions with the type of sets of worlds and adding an (...) axiom to the effect that each world is the set of propositions which are true there. Senses are compositionally assigned to linguistic expressions by a categorial grammar with only two rule schemas, based on the implicative fragment of intuitionistic linear propositional logic, and a fully explicit grammar fragment is provided that illustrates the compositional assignment of sense to a variety of constructions, including dummy-subject constructions, infinitive complements, predicative adjectives and nominals, raising to subject, ‘tough-movement’, and quantifier scope ambiguities. Notably, the grammar and the derivations that it licenses never make reference to either worlds or to the extensions of senses. (shrink)

The book explores and explains the relationship between law and ethics in the context of medically related research in order to provide a practical guide to understanding for members of research ethics committees (RECs), professionals involved with medical research and those with an academic interest in the subject.

Machine generated contents note: Table of Cases xi -- Table of legislation xv -- Introduction: Medicine Men, Outlaws and Voluntary Euthanasia 1 -- 1. To Kill or not to Kill; is that the Euthanasia Question? 9 -- Introduction-Why Euthanasia? 9 -- Dead or alive? 16 -- Euthanasia as Homicide 25 -- Euthanasia as Death with Dignity 29 -- 2. Euthanasia and Clinically assisted Death: from Caring to Killing? 35 -- Introduction 35 -- The Indefinite Continuation of Palliative Treatment 38 -- (...) Withholding or Withdrawing Treatment 44 -- The Principle of Double Effect 54 -- Physician Assisted Suicide 60 -- Mercy Killing 64 -- Conclusions 66 -- 3. Consent to Treatment but Not to Death 69 -- Introduction-Why Consent? 69 -- Without Consent 70 -- Killing and Consent 73 -- Valid Consent, Freely Given? 74 -- Old Enough to Consent 80 -- Deciding for Others 82 -- Conclusions-A Consent Too Far? 93 -- 4. Autonomy, Self-determination and Self-destruction 95 -- Introduction-Autonomous Choices 95 -- Choosing to Die-Suicide and Autonomy 100 -- Suicidal Intentions 107 -- Autonomous Clinical Discretion 110 -- Deciding to Live or Die-Whose Decision? 112 -- 5. Living Wills and the Will to Die 115 -- Introduction 115 -- I Know My Will 118 -- This is My Will 121 -- I Will Decide 128 -- Will My Will be Done? 134 -- Where There's a Will 137 -- Conclusions 143 -- 6. Is Euthanasia a Dignified Death? 145 -- Introduction-Why Dignity? 145 -- Needing Dignity 146 -- Finding Dignity 149 -- Achieving Dignity in Dying 151 -- Dignifying Death 157 -- 7. Conclusions: Dignified Life, Dignified Death and Dignified Law 165 -- Select Bibliography 175 -- Index 183. (shrink)

We are creatures of habit. Familiar ways of doing things in familiar contexts become automatic for us. That is to say, when we acquire a habit we can act without thinking about it at all. Habits free our minds to think about other things. Without this capacity for habitual action our daily lives would be impossible. Our minds would be crowded with innumerable mundane considerations and decisions. Habitual actions are not always mundane. Aristotle famously said that acting morally is a (...) matter of exercising the right habits.2 For him, a lack of conscious thought is no bar on an action’s moral status. Habits are involved in our most prized activities. Of course our natural capacity for acquiring habits is sometimes a nuisance, and we acquire bad habits all too easily. But we nevertheless could not do without a vast array of habits which are not like this, and we can’t help but exercise them in our daily lives. It does not seem too strong to say that we spend much more of our time acting habitually than we do acting in the light of conscious thought. We are also rational creatures. It is because of our rationality that we naturally think that most human actions are different in kind from the behaviour of other animals. This difference is manifest in the fact that we hold rational creatures personally responsible for what they do, in ways that would make no sense for nonrational creatures. Our rationality, then, appears to give our actions a unique quality. (shrink)

David Pollard's previously unpublished poem 'Francesca da Rimini'.

Is the Axiom of Foundation a truth or a falsehood about the universe of sets? Such questions have always struck this reviewer as unmathematical and a bit silly. Of course, that appraisal is more like a grunt of disapproval than an argument. We would welcome arguments. Justin Clarke-Doane offers a pretty good one that goes roughly as follows.Mathematicians making reasoned judgments about set-theoretic principles sometimes take positions that appear incompatible: one mathematician making a claim that would contradict the claim of (...) another if both claims were treated as assertions about a single universe of sets. If the claims are sincerely made and contradict each another, one party to the dispute must be expressing a false belief. It is characteristic of reliable methods that they significantly impede the formation of false beliefs. Reliable methods for fixing set-theoretic beliefs significantly impede the formation of false beliefs about sets. So, if we knew which party in a set-theoretic dispute has got it wrong, we would have evidence that that party’s methods are unreliable. But it is frequently unclear why the reasons offered by one side should prevail over those offered by the other. Unable to pinpoint the error, we could find ourselves less confident about the methods of each party. We might even wonder if there is much hope of establishing the reliability of set-theoretic methods in general. (shrink)

Curriculum-focused films suitable for all exam boards with board-specific worksheets for Edexcel, AQA, OCR, and WJEC. Short film clips talk students through key ideas, using student-friendly language and visual signposting to break down difficult concepts. This DVD covers three ethical theories; Utilitarianism; Kantian Ethics; Virtue Ethics and features interviews with contemporary philosophers to bring debates vividly to life.

“Bads” e.g. poverty, deprivation, constraint, ill-treatment, misery The traditional concern of theories of punishment (“retributive justice”).

Given the Sellarsian distinction between the space of causes and the space of reasons, the naturalist seeks to articulate how these two spaces are unproblematically related. In Mind and World (1996) John McDowell suggests that such a naturalism can be achieved by pointing out that we work our way into the space of reasons by the process of upbringing he calls Bildung. 'The resulting habits of thought and action', writes McDowell, 'are second nature' (p. 84). In this paper I expose (...) one implication of this remark, namely, that Bildung naturalism requires a conception of a type of action which is at once rational and habitual. Current orthodoxies in the philosophy of action prevent these two features from easily co-existing. Whilst various reconciliations are possible, I argue that only one keeps Bildung naturalism intact. This, however, commits the naturalist to a conception of reasons more radically external than any to be found in current literature, according to which the agent need have no conception of what her reasons are at the time of acting. This is what I call acting in the dark of reasons. One upshot for McDowell is that this conception of reasons may be in tension with some of his other claims. (shrink)

A dearth of clinical research involving children has resulted in off-licence and sometimes inappropriate medications being prescribed to the paediatric population. In this environment, recent years have seen the introduction of a raft of regulation aimed at increasing the involvement of children in clinical trials research and generating evidence-based medicinal preparations for their use. However, this regulation pays scant attention to the autonomy of competent minors. In particular, it makes no provision for the ability of competent minors to consent to (...) participate in medical research and is therefore at odds with best ethical practice. This article explores the tensions between law and ethics in relation to clinical research involving minors and concludes that greater respect should be given to the autonomy of those minors who are competent to decide for themselves. (shrink)

In this interview with W. Alton Jones Professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University, Lucius T. Outlaw, Jr, we discuss the metaphysical and ethical questions of grouping and classifying people in terms of race and ethnicity. Outlaw is the author of [On Race and Philosophy] and one of the recognised pioneers of Africana Philosophy. Outlaw talks about growing up in racial segregation in Starkville, Mississippi, the Black Power movement, the notion of the Black intellectual, scholarship and teaching, and philosophizing about race. (...) We discuss the ambiguity of the concept of philosophy of race and explore the concepts of raciality, categories, human sociality, evolution, and oppression. With his philosophical, political, and sociological influences, Outlaw asserts that racism makes no sense at all because the diversity of our species is one of our greatest assets; and in terms of survival, we are all of the same species though certain group-shared differences do matter. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Hazel E. Barnes FLAUBERT AND SARTRE ON MADNESS IN KING LEAR T'oward the end of the second volume of The Family Idiot (L'Idiot de la famille), in a section called "Exercises and Reading," Sartre discusses Flaubert's reading of Shakespeare.1 In the context Sartre describes how Flaubert spent his time during one of the rare periods when he was not even attempting to write anything; more than two years (...) elapsed between the completion of the first Sentimental Education in January 1845 and die beginning of his collaboration widi Maxime Du Camp on La Bretagne. Along with doing desultory background reading for "an oriental tale," and analyzing the plays ofVoltaire, Flaubert claimed to be studying the Greek and Roman authors and a selected few of the later "great immortals." Sartre shows that Flaubert's way of reading them was entirely different from the critical analysis which he directed on the work of his contemporaries. Essentially it was a series of"rereadings," and its purpose was not to gain knowledge or even a fuller understanding of the text. In a letter to Mlle de Chantepie, Flaubert counsels her to take one of the great writers and "study him in depth," reading from beginning to end and then starting over again: "But do not read, as children read, to amuse yourself, nor as the ambitious read, to instruct yourself. No, read so as to live. Create in your soul an intellectual atmosphere which will be compounded from the emanation of all the great minds."2 How can Flaubert both counsel his correspondent to study in depdi and not to seek instruction? The kind ofstudy he has in mind, Sartre claims, is comparable to the way in which an amateur pianist might "study" Chopin, where die aim is not to understand analytically but to perfect a particular interpretation and to evoke a certain aesdietic reaction. Flaubert resists instruction because new knowledge risks forcing change. What he wants is 211 2 1 2 Philosophy and Literature to rediscover the same eternal truths and emotions.3 It is also to find inspiration for his own dreams, an oneiric reading. In this connection Sartre makes two important points. First, in striving to cultivate for the soul "an intellectual atmosphere... compounded from the emanation of all the great minds," the artist is adding so many strings to his lyre — the laugh of Rabelais, the cosmic passions of Shakespeare, the skepticism of Montaigne. This is whyJules at the end of die first Sentimental Education plans to study die great writers, beginning with Homer — not to learn dieir technique but to enlarge the artist's sensibility. Sartre's second point is made apropos of Flaubert's rereading of Shakespeare. Flaubert fluctuates between two responses. Sometimes he is depressed at the thought of his own lack of genius in comparison with Shakespeare. "That good man will drive me mad.... All odiers seem to me children beside him."* At odier times he experiences what Sartre calls a "glorifying identification." It is as though in imagination he becomes Shakespeare. In part this is because, as he writes in this same letter, we artists "breathe in our existence by means of die sentence." Sartre notes that for Flaubert the existence in question is a literary reality, not that of die everyday world; we may breathe it in either dirough writing or through reading. At this particular moment in his life, Sartre argues, Flaubert's program of study was in bad faith. He allowed die imaginary identification to suffice. Sartre goes so far as to say, "He reads in order not to write; in diis masturbatory substitute for the act, he makes himself an aumor all at once, under anodier name, in order not to work at becoming the writer of genius he wants to be." This comment makes sense if we recall Flaubert's situation in 1845-47. After the nervous crisis at Pont-L'Evêque he knew that either he would be a writer or he would remain a feeble invalid, an object of pity, the "family idiot." "There he is, dien, paralyzed by two opposing forces: hope and die fear of being disappointed " (p. 2021). No wonder he... (shrink)

The Continuing Legacy of Simone Weil analyzes the core work of Simone Weil and her views on the nature of the human condition, humanity’s relationship with God, and the objective state of our world.