We argue that Isaac Newton really is best understood as being in the tradition of the Mechanical Philosophy and, further, that Newton saw himself as being in this tradition. But the tradition as Newton understands it is not that of Robert Boyle and many others, for whom the Mechanical Philosophy was defined by contact action and a corpuscularean theory of matter. Instead, as we argue in this paper, Newton interpreted and extended the Mechanical Philosophy's slogan “matter and motion” in reference (...) to the long and distinguished tradition of mixed mathematics and the study of simple machines. (shrink)

David Hume's most brilliant and ambitious work is entitled A Treatise of Human Nature, and it, together with his other writings, has left an indelible mark on philosophical conceptions of human nature. So it is not merely the title of Hume's work that makes discussion of it an appropriate inclusion to this volume, but the fact of its sheer influence. However, its pattern of influence – including, of course, the formulations of ideas consciously antithetical Hume's own – is an immensely (...) complex one, subtle and incredibly difficult to decode. In all probability ‘Hume's’ presence in contemporary thinking of human nature is to likened to the end product of a historiographical game of Chinese whispers, whereby ‘Hume's’ view on x and y is now inflected with interpretations his work – or, more accurately, selected parts of it – that are in turn filtered by thinkers and traditions with different focuses and interest from Hume's own. I am not equipped even to begin to trace this line of influence, a lack compounded by my relative ignorance of the present state of the debate on human nature. Nevetheless various ‘humean’ doctrines still orient debate and I guess these claims include the idea that causation is a matter of instantiating a universal regularity, that normativity can understood causally, that motivation is a matter of belief plus some independently intelligibly ‘attitude’, that a self is best conceived as a collection of independent states that combine to yield a self and so on. (shrink)

Institutional ethics committees (IECs) are part of a growing phenomenon in the American health care system. Although a major force driving hospitals to establish IECs is the desire to resolve difficult clinical dilemmas in a quick and systematic way, in this paper we argue that such a goal is naive and, to some extent, misguided. We assess the growing trend of these committees, analyse the theoretical assumptions underlying their establishment, and evaluate their strengths and shortcomings. We show how the 'medical (...) consultation' model is often inappropriately applied to IECs and suggest that IECs must operate under a different framework. Finally, we argue that IECs should be valued for the process they facilitate, and not for the product that they are, often unreasonably, expected to deliver. (shrink)

Restrictions on research on therapeutic cloning are questionable as they inhibit the development of a technique which holds promise for succesful application of pluripotent stem cells in clinical treatment of severe diseases. It is argued in this article that the ethical concerns are less problematic using therapeutic cloning compared with using fertilised eggs as the source for stem cells. The moral status of an enucleated egg cell transplanted with a somatic cell nucleus is found to be more clearly not equivalent (...) to that of a human being. Based on ethical considerations alone, research into therapeutic cloning should be encouraged in order to develop therapeutic applications of stem cells. (shrink)

Assume that we communicate for the purpose of trying to change a person's behavior either overtly or covertly. As long as this is done in an honest manner, no concern with ethics is involved. But suppose a communication pattern — subliminals — is developed that covertly tries to change our behavior without our consent. Then, concern with ethics is involved.Very little evidence exists to support a definitive quantitative impact of subliminal communication. There is a suggestion, however, that subliminals do in (...) fact manipulate people to do certain things. If this is so, then we have an over-riding issue in ethics — the ultimate invasion of a person's privacy — his mind. (shrink)

Purpose: Explore public attitudes towards the trade-offs between justice and medical outcome inherent in organ allocation decisions.Background: The US Task Force on Organ Transplantation recommended that considerations of justice, autonomy and medical outcome be part of all organ allocation decisions. Justice in this context may be modeled as a function of three types of need, related to age, clinical urgency, and quality of life.Methods: A web-based survey was conducted in which respondents were asked to choose between two hypothetical patients who (...) differed in clinical urgency , age, pretransplant and post-transplant quality of life, and life expectancy.Results: A pool of 1600 people were notified via email about the survey; 623 responded. Respondents preferred giving organs to younger people up to an age difference of <15.4 years and more clinically urgent people up to a difference in urgency of <2.54 months . Priority varied with the quality of life of the worst-off patient and the relative status of the patients. If both had worse than average quality of life, respondents preferred the better-off patient. When both had better than average quality of life, they preferred the worse-off patient. In analysis according to age versus clinical urgency, the older the patient, the more urgency needed to receive priority. In quality of life versus clinical urgency, the better the control’s quality of life, the more urgency the competing patient required. The worse the patient’s post-transplant outcome, the more urgency needed to receive priority.Conclusions: It appears that clinical urgency is only one of many factors influencing attitudes about allocation decisions and that respondents may invoke different principles of fairness depending the relative clinical status of patients. (shrink)

He is the darling of naturalism or the bogeyman of scepticism, a friend to virtue or an unwitting party to incipient nihilism. He is politically conservative, or a liberator from old views. He is a fideist, an advocate of faith over reason, or a precursor of Richard Dawkins.

This article analyses the conception of virtue and vice in early modern Europe. It explains that there were two movements in conceptions of virtue during this period. The first is the Cartesian tradition wherein virtue is intimately related to the control of the passions and the other is the continuation of this theme in Britain in a more aesthetic version. This article describes how the concepts of virtue and vice were softened by an awakening interest in the social emotions and (...) in the relationship between moral goodness and happiness. (shrink)

In this book review I argue that, broadly speaking, there are three rival accounts of the relationship between having a normative reason to act and being motivated to act. Neo-Humeans argue that an agent has a normative reason to act if and only if so doing would satisfy some desire of the agent; consequently, their task is to show that there is an internal relation between an agent’s having a normative reason to act and an agent’s having a desire to (...) act. Kantians argue that any agent who has a normative reason to act, and who is practically rational (i.e., not suffering from some debilitating form of practical irrationality, such as weakness of will or depression), will act; consequently, their task is to show that normative reasons always have overriding authority and that it is always irrational not to act upon them. Neo-Aristotelians argue that normative reasons for action are derived from facts about human well-being, and that an agent will be motivated to act provided that she has been habituated into having desires, guided by reason, to act for her own well-being; consequently, their task is to show how normative reasons can be derived from facts about human well-being and whether it is always in an agent’s best interest to act morally. (shrink)

In Chapter 6, Johanna E. Wolff uses models of measurements as a case for exploring two forms of scientific realism that are meant to address the problem of plurality of models in science: structural realism and perspectival realism. She distinguishes their motivations in the following way: structural realists address the plurality of models by looking for similarities, namely structural commonalities, between the models, whereas perspectival realists emphasize how differences among a plurality of models can be complementary. In comparing these realist (...) alternatives, Wolff chooses to focus on measurement theory. Wolff urges the idea that perspectival realism and structural realism are not competing realist accounts but complementary ones. (shrink)

Limits to Action: The Allocation of Individual Behavior presents the ideas and methods in the study of how individual organisms allocate their limited time and energy and the consequences of such allocation. The book is a survey of individual resource allocation, emphasizing the relationships of the concepts of utility, reinforcement, and Darwinian fitness. The chapters are arranged beginning with plants and general evolutionary considerations, through animal behavior in nature and laboratory, and ending with human behavior in suburb and institution. Topics (...) discussed include operant conditioning; the principle of diminishing returns; and issues in relation to mating strategies. Biologists, sociologists, economists, and psychologists will find the book interesting. (shrink)

J. E. J. Altham; XV*—Reproach, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 263–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/74.

The species of metaphysical speculation known as ontology is as old as philosophy itself. It is encountered in one form or another in all climes and times. In Western philosophy, it is already cultivated in a fairly sophisticated form in Parmenides: Being is positive and does not admit to the possibility of negation. Being is a plenum, etc. The problem which exercised the mind of Parmenides has lost something of its vitality in our time but it has recognizably survived in (...) such contemporary questions as “Are there negative facts?” At the present day, however, the liveliest issues of ontology revolve round a topic which has a different, if no less celebrated, ancestry. It is the problem of universals which, much discussed by Plato, was taken up and made a principal concern by the scholastics. It is being canvassed again in recent times under the heading of abstract entities. What I wish to investigate is the connection between the metaphysics of abstract entities and the discipline of logic as developed in the modern era. (shrink)