Descartes's works are often treated as a unified, unchanging whole. But in Descartes's Changing Mind, Peter Machamer and J. E. McGuire argue that the philosopher's views, particularly in natural philosophy, actually change radically between his early and later works--and that any interpretation of Descartes must take account of these changes. The first comprehensive study of the most significant of these shifts, this book also provides a new picture of the development of Cartesian science, epistemology, and metaphysics. No changes in Descartes's (...) thought are more significant than those that occur between the major works The World and Principles of Philosophy. Often seen as two versions of the same natural philosophy, these works are in fact profoundly different, containing distinct conceptions of causality and epistemology. Machamer and McGuire trace the implications of these changes and others that follow from them, including Descartes's rejection of the method of abstraction as a means of acquiring knowledge, his insistence on the infinitude of God's power, and his claim that human knowledge is limited to that which enables us to grasp the workings of the world and develop scientific theories. (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)

One of the earliest and most influential treatises on the subject of this volume is Aristotle's Categories. Aristotle's title is a form of the Greek verb for speaking against or submitting an accusation in a legal proceeding. By the time of Aristotle, it also meant: to signify or to predicate. Surprisingly, the "predicates" Aristotle talks about include not only bits of language, but also such nonlinguistic items as the color white in a body and the knowledge of grammar in a (...) man's soul. (Categories I/ii) Equally surprising are such details as Aristotle's use of the terms 'homonymy' and 'synonymy' in connection with things talked about rather than words used to talk about them. Judging from the evidence in the Organon, the Metaphysics, and elsewhere, Aristotle was both aware of and able to mark the distinction between using and men tioning words; and so we must conclude that in the Categories, he was not greatly concerned with it. For our purposes, however, it is best to treat the term 'predication' as if it were ambiguous and introduce some jargon to disambiguate it. Code, Modrak, and other authors of the essays which follow use the terms 'linguistic predication' and 'metaphysical predication' for this. (shrink)

In 1961, at the age of nineteen, Jorge J. E. Gracia escaped from the island of Cuba by passing himself off as a Catholic seminarian. He arrived in the United States with just a few spare belongings and his mother's diamond ring secured in a hole in one of his shoes. With a Diamond in My Shoe tells the story of Gracia's quest for identity--from his early years in Cuba and as a refugee in Miami to his formative role in (...) institutionalizing the field of Latin American philosophy in the US academy. Committed to integrating into Anglo America without forgetting his roots, Gracia reflects on his struggles and successes as an immigrant and academic, bringing a philosopher's eye to bear on his personal and professional development as a leading Latinx scholar. (shrink)

We would like to thank the authors of the excellent Open Peer Commentaries on our target article, “Implementing Expanded Prenatal Genetic Testing: Should Parents Have Access to Any and All Fetal Ge...

IThe so-called enterprise or commercial-bureaucratic university has been with us for some time. To its advocates, it has set higher education on a rational footing and demystified the folkways of cosseted intellectuals. To its detractors, it galls the kibe. For observers and stakeholders alike, the age of the office has introduced a new way of thinking and speaking in campus boardrooms and action sessions. The idiom of markets and corporations—How competitive are we? What are the anticipated returns on investment? Where (...) can payroll efficiencies be found?—frames an instrumental, quantifiable understanding of the vita academica. Corporate clients need to decide…. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Der Islam Jahrgang: 93 Heft: 1 Seiten: 262-264.

The general thesis of this small, well written, but somewhat austere, volume is that Rousseau’s concept of the state of nature is the core of his theoretical teaching. While this is not a particularly surprising thesis, Plattner does show the extent to which Rousseau radicalized the notion of the state of nature. Since Hobbes it had been almost impossible to begin a political discourse without reference to the state of nature as the point of departure. Rousseau, in effect, destroyed this (...) tradition by arguing that history rather than nature provided the true point of departure, and that natural right or natural law consequently provided no ground for political obligation. (shrink)

What are physical quantities, and in particular, what makes them quantitative? This book presents an original answer to this question through the novel position of substantival structuralism, arguing that quantitativeness is an irreducible feature of attributes, and quantitative attributes are best understood as substantival structured spaces.

This book is available either individually, or as part of the specially-priced Arguments of the Philosphers Collection.

Prologue: Stormclouds : London, April 1900 -- Quantum of action: The most strenuous work of my life : Berlin, December 1900 ; Annus Mirabilis : Bern, March 1905 ; A little bit of reality : Manchester, April 1913 ; la Comédie Française : Paris, September 1923 ; A strangely beautiful interior : Helgoland, June 1925 ; The self-rotating electron : Leiden, November 1925 ; A late erotic outburst : Swiss Alps, Christmas 1925 -- Quantum interpretation: Ghost field : Oxford, August (...) 1926 ; All this damned quantum jumping : Copenhagen, October 1926 ; The uncertainty principle : Copenhagen, February 1927 ; The 'Kopenhagener geist' : Copenhagen, June 1927 ; There is no quantum world : Lake Como, September 1927 -- Quantum debate: The debate commences : Brussels, October 1927 ; An absolute wonder : Cambridge, Christmas 1927 ; The photon box : Brussels, October 1930 ; A bolt from the blue : Princeton, May 1935 ; The paradox of Schrödinger's cat : Oxford, August 1935 -- Interlude: The first war of physics : Christmas 1938-August 1945 -- Quantum fields: Shelter Island : Long Island, June 1947 ; Pictorial semi-vision thing : New York, January 1949 ; A beautiful idea : Princeton, February 1954 ; Some strangeness in the proportion : Rochester, August 1960 ; Three quarks for Muster Mark! : New York, March 1963 ; The 'God particle' : Cambridge, Massachusetts, Autumn 1967 -- Quantum particles: Deep inelastic scattering : Stanford, August 1968 ; Of charm and weak neutral currents : Harvard, February 1970 ; The magic of colour : Princeton/Harvard, April 1973 ; The November revolution : Long Island/Stanford, November 1974 ; Intermediate vector bosons : Geneva, January/June 1983 ; The standard model : Geneva, September 2003 -- Quantum reality: Hidden variable : Princeton, Spring 1951 ; Bertlmann's socks : Boston, September 1964 ; The Aspect experiments : Paris, September 1982 ; The quantum eraser : Baltimore, January 1999 ; Lab cats : Stony Brook/Delft, July 2000 ; The persistent illusion : Vienna, December 2006 -- Quantum cosmology: The wavefunction of the universe : Princeton, July 1966 ; Hawking radiation : Oxford, February 1974 ; The first superstring revolution : Aspen, August 1984 ; Quanta of space and time : Santa Barbara, February 1986 ; Crisis? What crisis? : Durham, Summer 1994 -- A quantum of solace? : Geneva, March 2010. (shrink)