In the opening sentence of his Methods of Logic, W. V. O. Quine writes, “Logic is an old subject, and since 1879 it has been a great one.”1 Quine is referring to the year in which Gottlob Frege presented his Begriffschrift, or “concept-script,” one of the first published accounts of a logical system or calculus with quantification and a function-argument analysis of propositions. There can be no doubt as to the importance of these introductions, and, indeed, Frege’s orientation and advances, (...) if not his particular system, have proven to be highly significant for much of mathematical logic and research pertaining to the foundations of mathematics. Nevertheless, Quine’s assessment, often repeated, obscures other.. (shrink)

Henry Sheffer’s 1908 Harvard Ph.D. thesis contains an interesting appendix on a central feature of the logical work of his thesis advisor, Josiah Royce. This is the claim in Royce’s 1905 article “The Relations of the Principles of Logic to the Foundations of Geometry” that an unsymmetric ordering relation can be defined on the single symmetric O-relation for which he gives postulates in that paper. Sheffer criticizes Royce’s specific definition from the point of view of the evolving twentieth century conception (...) of axiomatic method and also shows more generally that an unsymmetric1 order relation cannot be defined in the system of the 1905 paper based on the O-relation. In this article I wish to consider the nature.. (shrink)

J C Walker; The Philosopher’s Touchstone: towards pragmatic unity in educational studies, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 19, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, P.

In Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, leading figures in the fields of virtue ethics and ethics come together to present the first ...

The epistemic-basing relation is the relation that holds between a reason, or one’s grounds, and one’s belief when the belief is held for that reason. As I will explain, understanding this relation is crucial for epistemology since basing a belief on a reason seems necessary for epistemic justification to obtain. But what is the nature of this relation? Is it, at least in part, causal as one might assume? Or, due to problems with causal accounts, are rival accounts of the (...) basing relation motivated? That depends whether causal theories are really subject to the standard objections made against them. I will discuss what I take to be the most fundamental objection here. (shrink)

Analytic epistemologists agree that, whatever else is true of epistemic justification, it is distinct from knowledge. However, if recent work by Jonathan Sutton is correct, this view is deeply mistaken, for according to Sutton justification is knowledge. That is, a subject is justified in believing that p iff he knows that p. Sutton further claims that there is no concept of epistemic justification distinct from knowledge. Since knowledge is factive, a consequence of Sutton’s view is that there are no false (...) justified beliefs. <br> Following Sutton, I will begin by outlining kinds of beliefs that do not constitute knowledge but that seem to be justified. I will then be in a position to critically evaluate Sutton’s arguments for his position that justification is knowledge, concluding that he fails to establish his bold thesis. In the course of so doing, I will defend the following rule of assertion: (The JBK-rule) One must: assert p only if one has justification to believe that one knows that p.<br>. (shrink)

Integrating appreciative inquiry (AI) and pastoral care may help address the complex issues of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. This article explores the benefits of incorporating AI principles into pastoral care for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. Commercial sexual exploitation and trafficking involve exploitation, degradation, and violence, making them complex issues. By understanding the sex trade, we can recognise that prostitution is an act of exploitation. Some scholars believe that prostitution and human trafficking are interconnected, with (...) a focus on exploiting the poor, especially women and children. Commercial sexual exploitation can cause mental, emotional, and spiritual distress. Survivors require comprehensive aftercare to address their spiritual, self-esteem, and dignity needs. Organisational development-based AI is constructive and strength-based. Appreciative inquiry promotes positive development, community and individual strength, and resilience by re-contextualizing narratives and envisioning brighter futures. The use of AI could improve pastoral care and holistic rehabilitation. Pastoral caregivers using AI can promote reconciliation, development, and rehabilitation. Using strengths-based strategies, pastoral care practitioners can help survivors regain agency and purpose. Survivors receive spiritual support through the Appreciative Way, which combines contemplative spirituality and inquiry. Narrative exploration can help trauma survivors envision a bright future based on love and resilience. This study suggests that AI principles may benefit pastoral care recipients who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and sex trafficking. Pastoral caregivers can help survivors regain dignity, calling, and well-being by implementing an appreciative healing approach.Contribution: The article sheds light on the dehumanising consequences of sex trafficking on vulnerable populations in South Africa, particularly women and children. This article aims to explain how AI concepts can be applied to Practical Theology. Specifically, this article will demonstrate how the Appreciative Way can be utilised in pastoral care for healing from sex trafficking trauma. (shrink)

This collection of papers by prominent feminist thinkers advances the positive feminist project of remapping the moral by developing theory that acknowledges the diversity of women.

Peoples’ perceptions of healthy eating are influenced by the cultural context in which they occur. Despite this general acceptance by health practitioners and social scientists, studies suggest that there remains a relative homogeneity around peoples’ perceptions that informs a hegemonic discourse around healthy eating. People often describe healthy eating in terms of learned information from sources that reflect societies’ norms and values, such as the Canada Food Guide and the ubiquitous phrase “fruits and vegetables”. Past research has examined how built (...) environments shape people’s access to healthy living options, such as distribution of grocers versus convenience stores and fast food restaurants. Often overlooked is an in-depth understanding of how social contexts interact with built environments, molding peoples’ perceptions of healthy eating. This paper reports on perceptions of healthy eating in four communities across Alberta, Canada. A photovoice methodology was employed to elicit perceptions of healthy eating with 35 participants. This study illustrates how participants’ photographs and their stories convey multiple meanings about healthy eating within their own lives and communities. Findings suggest that a ‘local’ context is an important part of the discourse centered around the promotion of healthy eating practices in these and potential other communities. (shrink)

Aldo Leopold was a pragmatist in the vernacular sense of the word. Bryan G. Norton claims that Leopold was also heavily influenced by American Pragmatism, a formal school of philosophy. As evidence, Norton offers Leopold's misquotation of a definition of right (as truth) by political economist, A.T. Hadley, who was an admirer of the philosophy of William James. A search of Leopold's digitised literary remains reveals no other evidence that Leopold was directly influenced by any actual American Pragmatist or by (...) Pragmatism (although he may have been indirectly influenced by Pragmatism early in his career). A 1923 reference, by Leopold, to Hadley and Hadley's putative definition of truth, cited by Norton, is dripping with irony. Leopold, as he matured philosophically, regarded a profound cultural shift from anthropocentric dominionism and consumerism to an evolutionary-ecological worldview and an associated non-anthropocentric 'land ethic' to be necessary for successful and sustainable conservation. Hadley espoused a brutal form of Social Darwinism and his philosophy, as expressed in the book of Hadley's that Norton cites, is politically reactionary, militaristic and unconcerned with conservation. Leopold's mature philosophy and Hadley's – far from consonant, as Norton claims – are diametrically opposed. (shrink)

James Bohman’s account of what might be involved in thinking about ‘democracy across borders,’ and specifically of what might be involved in thinking about a potential shift from dêmos to dêmoi, compels both affirmation and resistance. His account is both elegant and sharply focussed: positive attributes that nevertheless affirm a very particular understanding of elegance, and a precise focus that manages to evade many considerations that might be considered important by people seeking to think about democracies and their futures in (...) many different situations. (Published: 5 February 2010) Citation: Ethics & Global Politics, Vol. 3, No. 1, 2010, pp. 21-36. DOI: 10.3402/egp.v3i1.4851. (shrink)

Working Virtue is the first substantial collective study of virtue theory and contemporary moral problems. Leading figures in ethical theory and applied ethics discuss topics in bioethics, professional ethics, ethics of the family, law, interpersonal ethics, and the emotions.

Rationale: Deep brain stimulation (DBS) of the hippocampus is proposed for enhancement of memory impaired by injury or disease. Many pre-clinical DBS paradigms can be addressed in epilepsy patients undergoing intracranial monitoring for seizure localization, since they already have electrodes implanted in brain areas of interest. Even though epilepsy is usually not a memory disorder targeted by DBS, the studies can nevertheless model other memory-impacting disorders, such as Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI). Methods: Human patients undergoing Phase II invasive monitoring for (...) intractable epilepsy were implanted with depth electrodes capable of recording neurophysiological signals. Subjects performed a delayed-match-to-sample (DMS) memory task while hippocampal ensembles from CA1 and CA3 cell layers were recorded to estimate a multi-input, multi-output (MIMO) model of CA3-to-CA1 neural encoding and a memory decoding model (MDM) to decode memory information from CA3 and CA1 neuronal signals. After model estimation, subjects again performed the DMS task while either MIMO-based or MDM-based patterned stimulation was delivered to CA1 electrode sites during the encoding phase of the DMS trials. Each subject was sorted (post hoc) by prior experience of repeated and/or mild-to-moderate brain injury (RMBI), TBI, or no history (control) and scored for percentage successful delayed recognition (DR) recall on stimulated vs. non-stimulated DMS trials. The subject’s medical history was unknown to the experimenters until after individual subject memory retention results were scored. Results: When examined compared to control subjects, both TBI and RMBI subjects showed increased memory retention in response to both MIMO and MDM-based hippocampal stimulation. Furthermore, effects of stimulation were also greater in subjects who were evaluated as having pre-existing mild-to-moderate memory impairment. Conclusion: These results show that hippocampal stimulation for memory facilitation was more beneficial for subjects who had previously suffered a brain injury (other than epilepsy), compared to control (epilepsy) subjects who had not suffered a brain injury. This study demonstrates that the epilepsy/intracranial recording model can be extended to test the ability of DBS to restore memory function in subjects who previously suffered a brain injury other than epilepsy, and support further investigation into the beneficial effect of DBS in TBI patients. (shrink)

C W Evers, J C Walker; Knowledge, Partitioned Sets and Extensionality: a refutation of the forms of knowledge thesis, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume.

The so-called internalism/externalism debate is of interest in epistemology since it addresses one of the most fundamental questions in the discipline: what is the basic nature of epistemic justification? What has been called epistemic internalism holds, as the label suggests, that all the relevant factors that determine positive epistemic status of a belief must be “internal”. A common way that the “internal” is understood is those things that are, or easily can be, available to the agent’s conscious awareness. However, there (...) is another, and increasingly popular, way of spelling out the epistemically “internal”. A view advocated by Feldman and Conee which they regard as a kind of epistemic internalism, called ‘Mentalism’, holds that epistemic justification strongly supervenes upon the mental. In this paper I will show that even many of those who claim to deny an awareness requirement implicitly appeal to it to motivate their accounts of justification. By considering the arguments for ‘Mentalism’ I will show that, unless an awareness requirement is presupposed, the cases that such arguments appeal to are of no intuitive force. Therefore, insofar as one wants to be an internalist about epistemic justification, one needs to motivate, articulate, and defend an access/awareness condition. Epistemic Internalism, properly construed, ought to stress the epistemic significance of consciousness and the first person perspective. (shrink)

I intend to defend the following as a necessary condition of a belief S being epistemically justified for a subject:Awareness Requirement: S is justified in believing that P only if i) there is something, X, that contributes to the justification of B; and ii) S is aware of X.This will be shown through drawing attention to our considered judgments about cases. That will then lay the groundwork for giving an account of the nature of this awareness in the second half (...) of this paper. In doing so I will examine and respond to an argument against the awareness requirement that we might call Bergmann‟s Dilemma. My solution invokes what I call “non-doxastic strong awareness” in a way that avoids the regresses that Bergmann advances. (shrink)

The purpose of this study was to examine the impact of parenting and adolescent fearfulness on adolescents’ pro‐social values and pro‐social and antisocial behaviour. A total of 134 adolescents (M age = 16.22, 72 girls, 62 boys) responded to questions regarding their own fearfulness, pro‐social values and pro‐social and antisocial behaviour, as well as their perceptions of maternal attachment and maternal appropriateness. Results revealed few main‐effect findings, most notably a negative relation between attachment and antisocial behaviour. However, findings pointed to (...) several multiplicative relations as a function of parenting, adolescent fearfulness, and child gender, including: (1) maternal appropriateness was more important for boys than for girls, (2) maternal attachment was related to greater importance of pro‐social values and higher pro‐social behaviour for boys low on fear and (3) maternal appropriateness was related to lower antisocial behaviour for boys low on fear. The discussion focuses on the importance of examining the multiplicative relations between parenting and adolescent temperament and the implications of this for both educators and parents. (shrink)

From the third century we pass to the thirteenth, from a century in which Europe is still pagan to a century in which Christianity has been so long established there that its paganism is wellnigh forgotten, from a century in which it is ruled by a Roman emperor to one in which ecclesiastically it is still ruled by Rome, but the empire has passed from the Roman to the Teuton.

Belief is the affirmation of reality, but not all affirmations of reality are beliefs, for if we have, or have had, perceptual experience of a reality, we do not say, “I believe,” but “I see, hear, perceive, or remember.” Similarly, of the realities involved in our inner experience, we say, “What I had in mind, desired, hoped, or felt was…” or else say, more simply, “I was much moved, was in pain, felt affection or hatred, longed for, was thinking about, (...) knew.” On the other hand, there are realities of the perceptual order in which we may express belief, as when we say, “I believe that New Zealand exists, that nitrogen is a gas, that the earth is round, that William the Conqueror crossed the Channel in 1066, that Jesus Christ suffered under Pontius Pilate, was crucified, died, was buried, and rose again.” The realities in which we thus express belief are not realities which we ourselves have observed, but are such that they could have been observed by a person appropriately situated in time and in place. Hence in this case it is not the nature of the realities affirmed that differentiates belief from experience of either the perceptual or the inner type. The difference lies elsewhere. When we affirm a reality of which we ourselves have, or have had, perceptual experience, it is the reality itself, present to our perceiving mind, which alike determines the content of our affirmation and justifies us in making it. (shrink)

As a conservation policy advocate and practitioner, Leopold was a pragmatist (in the vernacular sense of the word). He was not, however, a member of the school of philosophy known as American Pragmatism, nor was his environmental philosophy informed by any members of that school. Leopold's environmental philosophy was radically non-anthropocentric; he was an intellectual revolutionary and aspired to transform social values and institutions.

It is with these virile words of the Martinique poet Aimé Сésaire, an expression of assurance regained, testimony to a self-confidence once stolen but then reconquered, that I would like to open my remarks.*Africa was present at the last great international philosophical meeting two years ago in Montreal. I would like here to illustrate the meaning behind this presence and to explain the reasons why we wanted to be present, in order to avoid facile misunderstandings which could have weighty consequences.

This article investigates how Soren Kierkegaard's work developed a key subject utilized in international political theory, and ascribed to particular international actors (including nation-states) — The Self. Kierkegaard's core insights on ‘dread’ and its functions, the need for individuals to will a purpose and, finally, the limits of the Self, I argue, provide a basis from which we can understand the anxieties — The insecurities — That attend to the work of and on a ‘Self’, including that (especially that) of (...) political communities. Specifically, Kierkegaard's engagements with the real and the ideal Self — The Self as it actually is and as it potentially could be — Can be utilized to index and understand the focus in certain vitalist philosophies with the Self of both individuals and political communities. Kierkegaard's insights help us understand this foregrounding of the Self, and yet his work also helps critically render particular recent manifestations of vitalism, found especially in US neoconservatism. (shrink)

Questions about when to limit unhelpful treatments are often raised in general medicine but are less commonly considered in psychiatry. Here we describe a survey of U.S. psychiatrists intended to characterize their attitudes about the management of suicidal ideation in patients with severely treatment-refractory illness. Respondents (n = 212) received one of two cases describing a patient with suicidal ideation due to either borderline personality disorder or major depressive disorder. Both patients were described as receiving all guideline-based and plausible emerging (...) treatments. Respondents rated the expected helpfulness and likelihood of recommending each of four types of intervention: hospitalization, additional medication changes, additional neurostimulation, and additional psychotherapy. Across both cases, most respondents said they were likely to provide each intervention, except for additional neurostimulation in borderline personality disorder, while fewer thought each intervention would be helpful. Substantial minorities of respondents indicated that they would provide an intervention they did not think was likely to be helpful. Our results suggest that while most psychiatrists recognize the possibility that some patients are unlikely to be helped by available treatments, many would continue to offer such treatments. (shrink)

This paper returns to some themes found in David Mitrany's classical ‘functionalist’ approach to international politics, in order to reconstruct practical principles that might be applied to contemporary politics as well as debates in International Relations and international political theory. It attempts to do this through two moves — ‘restoration’ and ‘contemporary reconstruction’. In restoring some of the insights Mitrany provides us that have been somewhat obscured over time, the paper hopes to demonstrate the ‘function’ behind functionalism — that its (...) core assumptions as an approach (if not ‘theory’) to international politics can prove to be just as instructive today as they were during the several decades of their initial development by Mitrany. Reconstruction, however, is necessitated by the observation that some of Mitrany's aspirations for functional theory — namely that it would produce ‘bonds’ that not only transcend national communities, but provide for the unraveling of the nation-state system as we know it — were a bit utopian. Thus, the paper proposes several avenues to reconstruct classical functionalism for contemporary politics. The paper then discusses three small empirical illustrations where micro-political insights can be extracted and briefly analysed: peace camps, the Regional Cooperation Council of the former Yugoslavia, and a more detailed analysis of the so-called ‘surge’ strategy in the ongoing US-Iraq conflict. It concludes with a two-pronged discussion on how micro-politics might speak to current debates in international political theory, and some mechanisms for securing functional spaces. (shrink)