This book presents a detailed, up-to-date, and historically informed survey and critical explication of the deflationary approach to the topic of truth. It is divided into three parts. Part 1 explains what deflationism about truth involves and develops a useful framework that clarifies how this approach differs from the traditional, "inflationary" approach. The framework illuminates certain general deflationary themes in terms of what we call broad four-dimensional deflationism, which comprises four different dimensions that any deflationary account must satisfy. We first (...) examine the degree to which each of these dimensions is displayed in early, "proto-deflationary" accounts. We then, while explaining the details and historical development of the different contemporary species of deflationism, assess the degree to which each version of them adheres to the deflationary dimensions, in addition to clarifying how each species differs from inflationism and how they all differ from one another. (shrink)

Metaphysical presuppositions are important for guiding scientific practices and research. The success of twentieth-century biology, for instance, is largely attributable to presupposing that complex biological processes are reducible to elementary components. However, some biologists have challenged the sufficiency of reductionism for investigating complex biological phenomena and have proposed alternative presuppositions like organicism. In this article, contemporary cancer research is used as a case study to explore the importance of metaphysical presuppositions for guiding research. The predominant paradigm directing cancer research is (...) the somatic mutation theory, in which mutated genes are presumed to be ultimately responsible for explaining carcinogenesis. This reductionistic approach to cancer has been criticised recently, and an organistic approach has been proposed. The article concludes with a discussion of the reciprocal interaction of metaphysical presuppositions and scientific practices for investigating cancer's complex nature. (shrink)

For at least the past several decades, medicine has been embroiled in a crisis concerning the nature of its professionalism. The fundamental questions that drive this ongoing crisis are primarily three. First, what is the nature of medical professionalism? Second, who are medical professionals? Third, what does medicine or these professionals profess or promise? In this paper, the professionalism crisis vis-à-vis these questions is examined and analyzed chiefly in terms of both Francis Peabody’s and Edmund Pellegrino’s writings. Based on their (...) writings, I introduce a conceptual framework for professionalism to address the crisis. In addition, I contend that to address the professionalism crisis adequately, medicine’s position within an evolving health care network must also be considered. To that end, I first discuss the genesis of the crisis in terms of the Flexner Report and especially Peabody’s response to it. Next, I explore how the crisis intensified during the twentieth century, particularly in terms of medicine’s ultimate scientification and eventual commercialization, and how Pellegrino reacted to this. I then propose a health care professionalism cycle and a care-competence cycle to provide a conceptual framework for addressing the crisis. I conclude that medicine’s position is no longer as the center of health care but rather as another node within a wider evolving health care network. And the resolution of medicine’s professionalism crisis depends on medicine’s positioning and defining itself in terms of the professionalism for each of the other professions within the health care network. (shrink)

Proponents of the dual-process theory claim that two distinct types of mental faculties or minds are responsible for human cognition. The first is evolutionarily old and not unique to humans but shared with other organisms. Type-1’s key feature is autonomy from cognitive capacities; hence, it does not require working memory. Type-2 is evolutionarily recent and thought to be uniquely human. Its key feature is reflective cognitive-decoupling of Type-1 processes, if warranted; and it requires working memory. Critics, however, argue that one (...) mind is sufficient to account for human cognition and propose a unimodel theory of cognition. The debate over these theories depends upon metaphysical notions concerning the nature of cognitive capacities and processes; and, how to investigate and explain them. In this paper, I explore these notions in terms of analyzing the metaphysical presuppositions of dualism and monism, and then the methodological approaches of holism and reductionism, as well as the ontological categories of organicism and physicalism, which are often unspecified and/or unexamined in the cognition debate. Clarification of these metaphysical notions and consideration of others is important for progressing towards the debate’s resolution. To that end, a plurimodel theory of cognition—based on a metaphysical presupposition and a methodological approach of pluralism and pragmatism, respectively, as well as on an ontological category of dynamical system—is introduced and discussed. (shrink)

What is medical progress? The answer to this question is often associated with advances in diagnostic technology, with greater understanding of disease or pathological mechanisms particularly at the molecular level, or with the discovery of drugs and the developmental of surgical procedures to treat diseases. However, this facile answer can be problematic. In a New York Times Magazine article, for example, Lisa Sanders (2003) recounts a lecture delivered to her first-year class, at a "white-coat" ceremony, by the medical school dean. (...) Half of what we—the faculty—teach you—the students—is nonsense, she was told, but we don't know which half. She illustrates what the dean said, with the following change in advice for .. (shrink)

It is thought that a valid inference to a logically necessary conclusion must proceed from entirely necessary premises. Counter-examples show this is false. Perhaps while the truth of a necessary proposition may follow from non-necessary premises, its necessity cannot so follow. Counter-examples show this to be mistaken. Must anyone who comes to know the non-necessary premises employed in the various counter-examples have prior knowledge of the necessity of the conclusions of the counter-examples? I argue against this. It is true that, (...) for any necessary proposition, there must be necessary premises from which it may validly be inferred; but no one need use these, or know these, or know how to use them, in order to know the necessity of any proposition. (shrink)

This essay examines the metaphysical foundations of the natural sciences and Christian theology in order to complement the epistemic claims from both disciplines. These foundations include Robin Collingwood's notion of presuppositions and Ernan McMullin's epistemic and non-epistemic values. Specifically, the essay investigates the presuppositions and values of science and theology used for guiding and constraining the formation and evaluation of scientific theories and theological doctrines. Practitioners in both disciplines need to keep these presuppositions and values in mind when complementing epistemic (...) claims to form a comprehensive world picture. Complementing scientific and theological claims requires wisdom and restraint in analyzing the presuppositions and values that make such claims possible. For, theology without the input of science, and science without the input of theology, may lead to an impoverished world picture. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 44-46.

Corporate social responsibility (CSR) has become an increasingly significant managerial concept, yet the manager as an agent of corporate bureaucracy has been substantially missing from both the analytical and conceptual literature dealing with CSR. This article, which is both interpretative in nature and specific in reference to the U.K. cultural context, represents an attempt at addressing this lacuna by utilising qualitative data to explore the perceptions of managers working in corporations with developed CSR programmes. Exploring managerial perceptions of motives for (...) CSR initiatives, methods of stakeholder engagement, organisational integration of CSR and its impact on managerial work, this study concludes that an instrumental approach dominates, which indicates an external-internal organisational paradox in the design and execution of CSR initiatives. (shrink)

The essays in this book engage the original and controversial claims from Michael Boylan's A Just Society. Each essay discusses Boylan's claims from a particular chapter and offers a critical analysis of these claims. Boylan responds to the essays in his lengthy and philosophically rich reply.

As an essential companion to Plato's Apology and Crito, Socrates Against Athens provides valuable historical and cultural context to our understanding of the trial.

The article supplies an overview of UK modern languages education at school and university level. It attends particularly to trends over recent years, with regard both to numbers and to social elitism, and reflects on perceptions of language learning in the wider culture and the importance of gaining wider recognition of the value of languages education.

It would be difficult to exaggerate the importance of Cicero to British—and not only British—philosophers in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. For the most part, interest appears to have been much greater in De Officiis, De Finibus Malorum et Bonorum, De Natura Deorum, Academica, De Legibus, and so on, than in the works of Plato or of Aristotle. Yet Cicero was different things to different people. To many, he was the paradigmatic moderate Stoic, critical of the paradoxical excesses of Zeno (...) and Chrysippus, but unwilling to follow the Epicureans in their reduction of the goods of life to the merely useful and agreeable. In this rich and rewarding study of British moral philosophy from Locke to Hume, Tim... (shrink)