This is the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy comprehensive article on J.M.E. MacTaggart, with special focus on his methodology for philosophy, his metaphysical system, and his ethics.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and (...) On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Some elements of the theory of time by the English Hegelian John M. E. McTaggart will be applied to Spinoza s philosophy to elucidate the difference that the latter establishes between duration and eternity. McTaggart himself undertakes to establish this relationship with Spinoza in his famous article “The unreality of time ”. By analyzing Spinoza s theory of essence, we will show that the conception of eternity and McTaggart’s thesis on the unreality of time are (...) incompatible with Spinozian theory. The comparative method proposed here will be precisely what will allow us to better understand, in contrast to McTaggart’s theses, Spinoza’s position on time and eternity. (shrink)

This paper analyses the activities of five organizations shaping the debate over the global governance of genome editing in order to assess current approaches to public engagement (PE). We compare the recommendations of each group with its own practices. All recommend broad engagement with the general public, but their practices vary from expert-driven models dominated by scientists, experts, and civil society groups to citizen deliberation-driven models that feature bidirectional consultation with local citizens, as well as hybrid models that combine elements (...) of both approaches. Only one group practices PE that seeks community perspectives to advance equity. In most cases, PE does little more than record already well-known views held by the most vocal groups, and thus is unlikely to produce more just or equitable processes or policy outcomes. Our exploration of the strengths, weaknesses, and possibilities of current forms of PE suggests a need to rethink both “public” and “engagement.”. (shrink)

Background: A growing literature has raised—skeptically—the question of whether cutting-edge scientific research can identify and address broader ethical and policy considerations in real time. In genomics, the question is: Can ELSI contribute to genomics in real time, or will it be relegated to its historical role of after-the-fact outsider critique? We address this question against the background of a genomic screening project where we participated as embedded, real-time ELSI researchers and observers, from its initial design through its conclusion.Methods: As part (...) of the ELSI study design, the project included an ongoing reflexive ethnography in which the authors studied the process of its design and implementation. The authors were true participant observers, serving as members of various task-oriented groups while recording meetings and other events for ongoing qualitative analysis. We also conducted and analyzed interviews of multiple participants at the conclusion of the project.Results: Our real-time ELSI initiative had a mixed record of successes and challenges. If we define success as ELSI researchers having had an opportunity to participate fully in the project and to make the ELSI perspective heard, then our assessment is largely positive. If, however, we define successes as instances where real-time ELSI contributions changed the direction of the genomic or public health aspects of the GeneScreen project or, after careful deliberation, confirmed the appropriateness of the status quo, then we can identify only a few examples. While we had a seat at the table, we were, for the most part, tolerated guests.Conclusions: We conclude that there are significant barriers to real-time ELSI influence. The difficulty does not reside in any intended exclusion of an ELSI perspective, but in factors endemic to genomic research, including knowledge disparities, epistemological biases, and the pressures of time and money. (shrink)

This article introduces the key issues and themes that the articles in the Special Issue aim to apply and develop in greater detail. First, we argue that the field of collective remembering can be conceived as a site of active contestation, rather than simply a means of communicating a historic past or our deontic position in relation to these pasts. Approaching collective remembering as a Lieu de Dispute allows us, in turn, to foreground three consequential dimensions of remembrance, which the (...) articles in the issue examine in different ways: that collective remembering is an interpersonal, political and affective practice. This introduction discusses these three dimensions to collective remembering in greater detail, before outlining the remaining contents of the Special Issue. (shrink)

From a national U.S. sample of senior academic biochemists, ninety-four indicated that they personally knew of an incident of scientific wrongdoing. Among these individuals, less formal actions against an offending individual were endorsed when either actions were believed to have the potential to publicly embarrass the offending individual, or the actions might adversely affect the professional career of the whistleblower. These relationships remain significant after controlling for professional status, career age, and current level of formal departmental administrative responsibility. Study limitations (...) and implications are discussed. (shrink)

In this article, we analyse Il Memoriale della Shoah, the memorial of the victims of the Shoah in Milan, which was inaugurated in 2013 and, in 2015, was turned into a night shelter for destitute migrants. To understand the rhetoric and politics of the Memorial, we bring together the notions of affective practices, découpages du temps (lit. slices of time) and multidirectional memory. This analytic approach allows us to examine the nonlinear shape of remembering, the dialectic relationships between the spatialisation (...) of time and the temporalisation of space, the ways in which emotions are brought into being semiotically in context, and the ethical questions that these feelings raise. Through detailed multimodal and affective analysis of the affordances of the built environment and its soundscape, the curation of the Memorial, the contextualisation of three guided tours (two online and one in situ) and politicised commentary on the Memorial’s decision to shelter refugees, our paper illustrates the multi-layered character of the relationship between space and time – one in which the past, the present and the future partly overlap and mobilise political action. (shrink)

People often remember what they attend to in the world. Such memory can be cast as a kind of mental catalog or index of attended objects. To investigate how such an index is acquired and used, protocol data were collected from a programmer who scrolled to off‐screen objects from time to time as she worked. These protocol data were modeled using Soar, which constrains how the index is constructed. In the model, an index entry is an episodic trace encoded during (...) attention. The trace associates the attention event with a time symbol denoting the event's occurrence. Later, the model can ask itself whether it saw that object by calling to mind an image of the attention event. If this image retrieves a time symbol, then the model infers that the object exists and can reason about bringing the object back into view. Episodic indexing is a theory of these encoding and retrieval processes. It posits that information about attention events is encoded automatically, but that retrieval requires effort and knowledge. Episodic indexing is congruent with a range of results on episodic and temporal codes and recognition and recall processes. It incorporates source monitoring (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993) and is a simple and pervasive form of long‐term working memory (Ericsson & Kintsch, 1995). (shrink)

Jerry Fodor argues that the massive modularity thesis – the claim that (human) cognition is wholly served by domain specific, autonomous computational devices, i.e., modules – is a priori incoherent, self-defeating. The thesis suffers from what Fodor dubs the input problem: the function of a given module (proprietarily understood) in a wholly modular system presupposes non-modular processes. It will be argued that massive modularity suffers from no such a priori problem. Fodor, however, also offers what he describes as a really (...) real input problem (i.e., an empirical one). It will be suggested that this problem is real enough, but it does not selectively strike down massive modularity – it is a problem for everyone. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking by Daryn LehouxJohn M. OksanishDaryn Lehoux. What Did the Romans Know? An Inquiry into Science and Worldmaking. Chicago, Ill.: University of Chicago Press, 2012. xii + 275 pp. 10 black-and-white figs., 2 tables. Cloth, $45.“Have we ever been modern?” Thus author Daryn Lehoux expresses one of the fundamental questions underlying the book under review, which seeks to (...) present a historicizing account of the various lenses through which elite Romans in the late Republic and early Empire understood and, importantly, expressed their understanding of our world. I say “our” world because, as Lehoux makes clear from the beginning of this fascinating, if sometimes challenging, monograph, continuity with our scientific forebears is as fundamental a key to accessing their ambitions, limits, and scope, as are our divergences from them. In this sense, What Did the Romans Know? provides a kind of study in the reception of Roman sciences, whose plurality, interdependence, and context-specific viability are emphasized throughout. For although (1) physical realities have per se not [End Page 343] changed since antiquity, and (2) how we regard and describe them has, Lehoux insinuates that our own laws of nature remain limited by specific ontological and rhetorical constraints—“blind spots”—that render our modern science in some ways comparable with the sciences that operated in antiquity. By first emphasizing various contexts (epistemological, ontological, etc.) and showing readers how the ancient sciences operated within them, Lehoux effectively shows us that ancient sciences did indeed work, even astrology. However, Lehoux ultimately reveals himself as a scientific realist: the contextual viability of the ancient sciences notwithstanding, he does not believe in a Lucretian “swerve” but in atoms, electrons, and other phenomena that he has never seen directly. That he waits until the ninth chapter (200) for this admission to materialize fully is surely purposeful, but it can sometimes make for disorienting reading. Equally disorienting is the book’s tendency to present ancient scientific terms with little or no explanation (e.g., equant, 68; synodic anomaly, 69), while terms whose specific valences will be well-known to many readers of this journal (e.g., religio, 26; pietas, 27) are glossed, sometimes simplistically. Despite this and a few other caveats, however, Lehoux has broadly succeeded at a very difficult task, i.e., presenting ancient science in a manner that is accessible and interesting to Classicists of various stripes, while simultaneously delivering classical texts to historians of science through an essentially new historicist lens.The first three chapters provide examples from and discussions of selected texts that show the Romans making links between nature and law in science, religion (especially divination), and in legal theories. We quickly learn that Lehoux’s is not a book about Romans who merely applied Greek theories in the interest of technology or about the ways in which slave-power made an ancient industrial revolution unnecessary at Rome (the so-called blocage question, discussed by Serafina Cuomo in Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity [Cambridge, 2007]). Rather, this is a book about science as a reflection of, and participant in, the creation of Roman ideology and society. Any good discussion of Roman-ness at the end of the Republic inevitably involves a good deal of Cicero, who conveniently, and thus perhaps problematically, provides ample discussion of the kinds of topics in which Lehoux is interested, especially divination. Cicero’s apparently contradictory positions on the practice (Leg. 2.32 and Div. 2.74) are noted, as is the movement in the past thirty years away from the “naive” reading of De Divinatione as a “vigorous rationalistic protest” against a national superstition. Divination, for Lehoux’s Cicero, is neither an intellectual offense nor a politically expedient fiction; rather, it is a thoroughly Roman way of both seeing the world and doing business. Some of what is found here will not be new to classicists, and the chapter overall seems less interested in breaking new ground than in establishing, in deliberate fashion, the book’s foundational interest in seeing nature, law, and religion as legitimately connected. Divination and other phenomena reflect a Roman interest in a kind... (shrink)

At the request of the Midwest Bioethics Center (MBC), we surveyed nurses' and physicians' attitudes and needs regarding Hospital Ethics Committees (HECs). The primary objective of this research project was to inform the practices and policies of the Ethics Committee Consortium of the Bioethics Center.Four thousand eight hundred and twenty-nine surveys were distributed to the medical and nursing staff of eight Kansas City metropolitan area hospitals. One thousand and fifty-five surveys were returned, representing a response rate of 21%.

Intervention studies with developmental samples are difficult to implement, in particular when targeting demographically diverse communities. Online studies have the potential to examine the efficacy of highly scalable interventions aimed at enhancing development, and to address some of the barriers faced by underrepresented communities for participating in developmental research. During the COVID-19 pandemic, we executed a fully remote randomized controlled trial language intervention with third and fourth grade students from diverse backgrounds across the United States. Using this as a case (...) study, we discuss both challenges and solutions to conducting an intensive online intervention through the various phases of the study, including recruitment, data collection, and fidelity of intervention implementation. We provide comprehensive suggestions and takeaways, and conclude by summarizing some important tradeoffs for researchers interested in carrying out such studies. (shrink)

J. M. E. McTaggart: Substance, Self and Immortality. By Sharma Ramesh K.