Without trust there is no credible human health research (HHR). This article accepts this truism and addresses a crucial question that arises: how can trust continually be promoted in an ever-changing and uncertain HHR environment? The article analyses long-standing mechanisms that are designed to elicit trust—such as consent, anonymization, and transparency—and argues that these are best understood as trust represented by proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., regulatory attempts to convey the trustworthiness of the HHR system and/or its actors. Often, such proxies (...) are assumed to operate as markers that trust exists or, at least, has not been lost. But, since trust can neither be “built” nor “secured,” this is a precarious assumption. Worryingly, there is no existing theoretical account of how to understand and evaluate these proxies of trustworthiness as part of a trusted HHR ecosystem. To remedy this, the paper argues for a radical reimagining of trust and trustworthiness as performative acts that ought to be understood in relation to each other and by reference to the common values at stake. It is shown that proxies of trustworthiness are the operational tools used to perform trustworthiness. It advocates for a values-based approach to understanding the relationship between trust and trustworthiness. This establishes a strong basis for an evaluative framework for proxies of trustworthiness, i.e., to determine how to perform trustworthiness well. Five common proxies in HHR are scrutinized from a values perspective. The contribution is to provide a far-reaching normative and practical framework by which existing and future proxies of trustworthiness can be identified, assessed, maintained, or replaced in rapidly changing HHR regulatory ecosystems where trust itself is crucial to the success of the entire HHR enterprise. (shrink)

Are LLMs cultural technologies like photocopiers or printing presses, which transmit information but cannot create new content? A challenge for this idea, which we call bibliotechnism, is that LLMs generate novel text. We begin with a defense of bibliotechnism, showing how even novel text may inherit its meaning from original human-generated text. We then argue that bibliotechnism faces an independent challenge from examples in which LLMs generate novel reference, using new names to refer to new entities. Such examples could be (...) explained if LLMs were not cultural technologies but had beliefs, desires, and intentions. According to interpretationism in the philosophy of mind, a system has such attitudes if and only if its behavior is well explained by the hypothesis that it does. Interpretationists may hold that LLMs have attitudes, and thus have a simple solution to the novel reference problem. We emphasize, however, that interpretationism is compatible with very simple creatures having attitudes and differs sharply from views that presuppose these attitudes require onsciousness, sentience, or intelligence (topics about which we make no claims). (shrink)

I present a new puzzle about choice under uncertainty for agents whose preferences are sensitive to multiple dimensions of outcomes in such a way as to be incomplete. In response, I develop a new theory of choice under uncertainty for incomplete preferences. I connect the puzzle to central questions in epistemology about the nature of rational requirements, and ask whether it shows that preferences are rationally required to be complete.

This article presents a new interpretation of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s celebrated doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action”. Wang held that action was not unified with all knowledge, but only with an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes called “genuine knowledge”. I argue for a new interpretation of this notion, according to which genuine knowledge requires freedom from a form of doxastic conflict. I propose that, in Wang’s view, a person is free from this (...) form of doxastic conflict if and only if they are acting virtuously. (shrink)

According to relationism, for Alice to believe that some rabbits can speak is for Alice to stand in a relation to a further entity, some rabbits can speak. But what could this further entity possibly be? Higher-order metaphysics seems to offer a simple, natural answer. On this view (roughly put), expressions in different syntactic categories (for instance: names, predicates, sentences) in general denote entities in correspondingly different ontological categories. Alice's belief can thus be understood to relate her to a sui (...) generis entity denoted by "some rabbits can speak", belonging to a different ontological category than Alice herself. This straightforward account of the attitudes has historically been deemed so attractive that it was seen as providing an important motivation for higher-order metaphysics itself (Prior [1971]). But I argue that it is not as straightforward as it might seem, and in fact that propositional attitudes present a foundational challenge for higher-order metaphysics. (shrink)

AbstractThis essay argues for a new interpretation of the notion of “unity” in Yangming’s 王陽明 famous doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action” (zhi xing he yi 知行合一). I distinguish two parts of Wang’s doctrine: one concerning training (gong fu 工夫), and one concerning the “original natural condition” of knowledge and action (ben ti 本體). I focus on the latter aspect of the doctrine, and argue that Wang holds, roughly, that a person exhibits knowledge in its original natural condition (...) if and only if the person exhibits action in its original natural condition. Moreover, I argue that Wang denies that knowledge in its original natural condition is identical to action in its original natural condition. (shrink)

This paper studies one aspect of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s (王陽明 1472-1529) celebrated doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action (zhi xing he yi 知行合一). Wang states that his doctrine does not apply to all knowledge, but only to an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes calls “genuine knowledge” (zhen zhi 真知). But what is “genuine knowledge”? I develop and compare four different interpretations of this notion: the perceptual, practical, normative and introspective models. The main (...) aim of the paper is to develop these models in more detail than has been done before. But at the end of the paper I argue that the introspective model is to be preferred over the alternatives. (shrink)

This paper introduces the axiom of Negative Dominance, stating that if a lottery f is strictly preferred to a lottery g, then some outcome in the support of f is strictly preferred to some outcome in the support of g. It is shown that if preferences are incomplete on a sufficiently rich domain, then this plausible axiom, which holds for complete preferences, is incompatible with an array of otherwise plausible axioms for choice under uncertainty. In particular, in this setting, Negative (...) Dominance conflicts with the standard Independence axiom. A novel theory, which includes Negative Dominance, and rejects Independence, is developed and shown to be consistent. (shrink)

Pogge’s 2006 framework of global justice can be adapted for individual agents or collective unilateral donations in the same way Singer’s framework has been. I do so by amending Pogge’s institutional principles for international human rights NGOs and by adding two further principles to address challenges that arise when his framework is applied. This adapted framework enjoins donors to make principled philanthropic decisions that prioritize existing and near-term suffering, while also rectifying their part in causing this suffering. It makes Pogge’s (...) negative duty account easier to implement than his previous proposal, and provides well-off individuals with an alternative to Effective Altruism. (shrink)

Robert Aumann presents his Agreement Theorem as the key conditional: “if two people have the same priors and their posteriors for an event A are common knowledge, then these posteriors are equal” (Aumann, 1976, p. 1236). This paper focuses on four assumptions which are used in Aumann’s proof but are not explicit in the key conditional: (1) that agents commonly know, of some prior μ, that it is the common prior; (2) that agents commonly know that each of them updates (...) on the prior by conditionalization; (3) that agents commonly know that if an agent knows a proposition, she knows that she knows that proposition (the “K K” principle); (4) that agents commonly know that they each update only on true propositions. It is shown that natural weakenings of any one of these strong assumptions can lead to countermodels to Aumann’s key conditional. Examples are given in which agents who have a common prior and commonly know what probability they each assign to a proposition nevertheless assign that proposition unequal probabilities. To alter Aumann’s famous slogan: people can “agree to disagree”, even if they share a common prior. The epistemological significance of these examples is presented in terms of their role in a defense of the Uniqueness Thesis: If an agent whose total evidence is E is fully rational in taking doxastic attitude D to P, then necessarily, any subject with total evidence E who takes a different attitude to P is less than fully rational. (shrink)

We argue the need for academics to resist and challenge the hegemonic discourse of sustainable development within the corporate context. Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse theory provides a useful framework for recognizing the complex nature of sustainable development and a way of conceptualizing counter-hegemonies. Published empirical research that analyzes sustainable development discourse within corporate reports is examined to consider how the hegemonic discourse is constructed. Embedded assumptions within the hegemonic construction are identified including sustainable development as primarily about economic development, progress, (...) growth, profitability, and “responsibly” managed levels of resource depletion. We call for multiple voices in the discursive field to debate and to resist closure and highlight the possibilities for academic researchers to actively resist the hegemonic construction. Specifically, we advocate vigilance and awareness, critical and reflective analyses, challenge and resistance based on other frames of reference, and strategies for communicating both within and outside the academy. (shrink)

What form does power take in situations of retaliation against whistleblowers? In this article, we move away from dominant perspectives that see power as a resource. In place, we propose a theory of normative power and violence in whistleblower retaliation, drawing on an in-depth empirical study. This enables a deeper understanding of power as it circulates in complex processes of whistleblowing. We offer the following contributions. First, supported by empirical findings we propose a novel theoretical framing of whistleblower retaliation and (...) the role of mental health, which draws upon poststructuralist psychoanalytic thinking. Specifically, we highlight how intra- and inter-psychic affective and ambivalent attachments to organizations influence the use of normative violence in cases of whistleblower retaliation. The second contribution is empirical and builds upon the existing literature on whistleblower retaliation by highlighting how organizations position whistleblower subjects as mentally unstable and unreliable individuals, to undermine their claims. We conclude by highlighting the implications of normative power for the outcomes of whistleblower struggles. (shrink)

The coordinated attack scenario and the electronic mail game are two paradoxes of common knowledge. In simple mathematical models of these scenarios, the agents represented by the models can coordinate only if they have common knowledge that they will. As a result, the models predict that the agents will not coordinate in situations where it would be rational to coordinate. I argue that we should resolve this conflict between the models and facts about what it would be rational to do (...) by rejecting common knowledge assumptions implicit in the models. I focus on the assumption that the agents have common knowledge that they are rational, and provide models to show that denying this assumption suffices for a resolution of the paradoxes. I describe how my resolution of the paradoxes fits into a general story about the relationship between rationality in situations involving a single agent and rationality in situations involving many agents. (shrink)

I observe that the “concept-generator” theory of Percus and Sauerland (2003), Anand (2006), and Charlow and Sharvit (2014) does not predict an intuitive true interpretation of the sentence “Plato did not believe that Hesperus was Phosphorus”. In response, I present a simple theory of attitude reports which employs a fine-grained semantics for names, according to which names which intuitively name the same thing may have distinct compositional semantic values. This simple theory solves the problem with the concept-generator theory, but, as (...) I go on to show, it has problems of its own. I present three examples which the concept-generator theory can accommodate, but the simple fine-grained theory cannot. These examples motivate the full theory of the paper, which combines the basic ideas behind the concept-generator theory with a fine-grained semantics for names. The examples themselves are of interest independently of my theory: two of them constrain the original concept-generator theory more tightly than previously discussed examples had. (shrink)

Whether upheld as heroic or reviled as terrorism, people have been willing to lay down their lives for the sake of their groups throughout history. Why? Previous theories of extreme self-sacrifice have highlighted a range of seemingly disparate factors, such as collective identity, outgroup hostility, and kin psychology. In this paper, I attempt to integrate many of these factors into a single overarching theory based on several decades of collaborative research with a range of special populations, from tribes in Papua (...) New Guinea to Libyan insurgents and from Muslim fundamentalists in Indonesia to Brazilian football hooligans. These studies suggest that extreme self-sacrifice is motivated by identity fusion, a visceral sense of oneness with the group, resulting from intense collective experiences (e.g., painful rituals or the horrors of frontline combat) or from perceptions of shared biology. In ancient foraging societies, fusion would have enabled warlike bands to stand united despite strong temptations to scatter and flee. The fusion mechanism has often been exploited in cultural rituals, not only by tribal societies but also in specialized cells embedded in armies, cults, and terrorist organizations. With the rise of social complexity and the spread of states and empires, fusion has also been extended to much larger groups, including doctrinal religions, ethnicities, and ideological movements. Explaining extreme self-sacrifice is not only a scientific priority but also a practical challenge as we seek a collective response to suicide, terrorism, and other extreme expressions of outgroup hostility that continue to bedevil humanity today. (shrink)

Among philosophers, Fregeanism and sententialism are widely considered two of the leading theories of the semantics of attitude reports. Among linguists, these approaches have received little recent sustained discussion. This paper aims to bridge this divide. I present a new formal implementation of Fregeanism and sententialism, with the goal of showing that these theories can be developed in sufficient detail and concreteness to be serious competitors to the theories which are more popular among semanticists. I develop a modern treatment of (...) quantifying in for Fregeanism and sententialism, in the style of Heim and Kratzer, and then show how these theories can—somewhat surprisingly—account for “third readings” on the model of the “Standard Solution” from possible-worlds semantics. The resulting Fregean/sententialist proposal has a distinctive attraction: it treats data related to counterfactual attitudes —which have proven challenging to accommodate in the setting of possible worlds semantics—straightforwardly as third readings. (shrink)

An opinionated introduction to philosophical issues connected to common knowledge.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

An action-oriented epistemology takes the idea that our capacity for belief subserves our capacity for action as the starting point for epistemological theorizing. This paper argues that an action-oriented epistemology is especially well-positioned to explain why it is that, at least for believers like us, whether or not conforming with the epistemic norms that govern belief-regulation would lead us to believe that p always bears on whether we have normative reasons to believe that p. If the arguments of this paper (...) are successful, then an action-oriented approach has a kind of explanatory power that has proved elusive, and so merits serious and sustained philosophical attention that it has yet to receive. (shrink)

Epistemic evaluation is often appropriately prescriptive in character because believers are often capable of exercising some kind of control—call it doxastic control—over the way in which they regulate their beliefs. An intuitively appealing and widely endorsed account of doxastic control—the immediate causal impact account—maintains that a believer exercises doxastic control when her judgments about how she ought to regulate her beliefs in a particular set of circumstances can cause the believer actually to regulate her beliefs in those circumstances as she (...) judges she ought to. I show here that the immediate causal impact account is ultimately untenable. Nevertheless, the immediate causal impact account gets something important about the nature of doxastic control right: exercising doxastic control involves being such that one’s conception of ideal belief regulation somehow shapes the way in which one actually regulates one’s beliefs. Thus, I develop here an alternative account according to which, insofar as she exercises doxastic control, a believer’s conception of ideal belief regulation shapes the way in which she actually believes by exerting causal power directly on her dispositions to regulate her beliefs in certain ways. I defend this alternative against other competitors by showing that it can be extended to supply a unified account of rational control that explains why evaluation with respect to the various different norms of rationality that govern the way in which we form, revise and sustain not only our beliefs, but also our intention, hopes, fears, etc. is often appropriately prescriptive. (shrink)

Children are treated differently to adults in liberal societies with respect to their right to bodily integrity. A commonly given justification for treating them differently is that they supposedly lack the sort of autonomy that is normally attributed to neurotypical adults. As such children fall through the cracks when it comes to protecting their bodily integrity: they are viewed as less than fully autonomous persons in philosophical, medical, and legal settings. With this editorial, we analyse current treatments of the concept (...) of the child's right to bodily integrity and how this relates to their (developing or future) autonomy on various conceptions. (shrink)

A starting point for the sort of alethic epistemological approach that dominates both historical and contemporary western philosophy is that epistemic norms, standards, or ideals are to be characterized by appeal to some kind of substantively normative relationship between belief and truth. Accordingly, the alethic epistemologist maintains that false beliefs are necessarily defective, imperfect, or flawed, at least from the epistemic perspective. In this paper, I develop an action-oriented alternative to the alethic approach, an alternative that is inspired by and (...) jives with the kind of thinking that underwrites promising and increasingly popular enactive or embodied research programs in cognitive science. Moreover, I argue that the proponent of an action-oriented epistemological approach ought to deny that falsity, in and of itself, necessarily constitutes a kind of epistemic imperfection in belief. The action-oriented epistemologist ought to embrace the possibility that there are epistemically flawless false beliefs. (shrink)

Remarks on method in the history of Chinese philosophy for analytic philosophy. (Published in a Chinese Translation.).

The United Kingdom’s Coalition government has introduced an education policy that is focused on increasing the opportunities to promote and advance social mobility for all children within state education. Raising young people’s aspirations through school-based initiatives is a prominent theme within recent policy texts, which are focused on improving educational outcomes and thus advancing social mobility. This article draws on qualitative data from paired interviews with 32 students in two academies to first investigate if our participants’ aspirations indicate a desire (...) for intragenerational social mobility and second, to explore our participants’ perceptions of the influences of their family background on their aspirations for the future. Analysis of our data highlights the mismatch between our participants’ aspirations for the future and the government’s constructions of what they should aspire to, as articulated in policy texts. By investigating aspirations, as part of a wider project to understand social mobility qualitatively, our data shows the important role of family in shaping our participants’ varied and diverse aspirations that are frequently at variance with government policy. (shrink)

I respond to the insightful comments of Liu Liangjian, Stephen Angle, and Trenton Wilson.

The main aim of the book is to provide a good understanding of a range of semantic phenomena and issues in semantics, adopting a truth-conditional account of meaning, but without using a compositional formalism. The book assumes no particular background in linguistics of philosophy, and all the technical tools used are explained as they are introduced. They style is accessible, with numerous examples.

Children are individuals, and they are owed rights as individuals. Here, I offer a defence of the child's right to bodily integrity against genital cutting and modification practices. The liberal commitment to the right to bodily integrity works with the harm principle as a liberty limiting commitment within a system that respects people's embodied moral personhood and their decisions about their lives and bodies. Like adults within a political system committed to the equal protection of individual rights, children must have (...) equal rights that transcend the differences between them. But, they are different to adults in important ways, both philosophically and empirically. I offer an account of the child's right to bodily integrity that recognises them as particular embodied individuals, and prioritises their welfare interest in having their bodily integrity respected. (shrink)

I respond to the insightful comments of L iu Liangjian, Stephen Angle, and Trenton Wilson.

The difficult phrase ὅ ποτε ὄν ἐστι (hereafter ‘OPO’), which occurs in key passages in Aristotle’s discussions of blood and of time, has long vexed interpreters of Aristotle. This paper proposes a new interpretation of OPO, which resolves some textual and interpretative problems about Aristotle’s theories of blood and of time. My interpretation will also shed light on more general issues in Aristotle’s metaphysics. In the passages I will discuss, Aristotle takes both blood and time to be examples of his (...) peculiar ‘coupled entities’. He then uses OPO to provide explanations which differ from what we might call his ‘standard’ metaphysical explanations. On the ‘standard’ approach, Aristotle explains derivative entities—non-substances—by describing their relationship to substances. By contrast to this standard form of explanation, when Aristotle uses OPO he explains blood and time by describing their relationship to non-substances. This paper thus identifies a new species of metaphysical dependence in Aristotle. In addition, it provides detailed examination of evidence concerning whether Aristotle himself used coupled entities in his own physical and metaphysical theories. (shrink)

This article attempts to redress the neglect of Sartre's relationship to Augustine, putting forward a reading of the early Sartre as an atheist who appropriated concepts from Augustinian theology. In particular, it is argued, Sartre owes a debt to the Augustinian doctrine of original sin. Sartre's portrait of human reality in _Being and Nothingness_ is bleak: consciousness is lack; self-knowledge is impossible; and to turn to the human other is to face the imprisonment of an objectifying gaze. But this has (...) recognizable antecedents in Augustine's account of the condition of human fallenness. The article, therefore, demonstrates the significant similarities between Sartre's ontology of human freedom and Augustine's ontology of human sin; and asks whether Sartre's project – as defined in _Existentialism Is a Humanism_ – 'to draw the full conclusions from a _consistently atheistic position_' – results in a vision of the world without God, but not without sin. It is proposed that this opens the possibility for a previously unexplored theological reading of Sartre's early work. (shrink)

At several key moments in his works, Hume draws our attention to the differences between two conceptions of philosophy. Deploying what were already then well‐worn metaphors, he calls these two “species” of philosophy “anatomy” and “painting.” Hume’s remarks about philosophical anatomy and painting have recently given rise to a number of scholarly debates. I focus here on just one of these debates: did Hume intend to combine anatomy and painting in some of his later works? Through an examination of the (...) evidence that has to date been adduced, I argue that we have at least one very good reason to think that such were Hume’s intentions, and no good reason to suppose otherwise. (shrink)

This essay argues that it is a matter of vital concern to develop a theoretical apparatus that is adequate to the inherent spatiotemporal dynamics of capital accumulation and the changing practices developed to manage the crisis tendencies of those dynamics. This requires integrating the a-spatial theory of capital accumulation and its internal contradictions with the spatial/geographical theory of imperialism that invokes geopolitical and geo-economic struggles between nation-states. I argue that the two are linked by the way capital deals with the (...) problem of absorbing capital surpluses, namely through geographical fixes. The geographical fix requires imperialist expansionism and the battering down of all barriers to the spatial movement of capital. Such a conception provides the necessary clarity in formulating the relations between capital and state that are sometimes missing from Ellen M. Wood's arguments in Empire of Capital. (shrink)

Ryle (1949, Chapter V) discusses a range of predicates which in different ways exemplify a property I shall call quasi-duality - they appear to report two actions or events in one predicate. Quasi-duality is the key property of predicates Ryle classed as achievements. Ryle's criteria for classification were not temporal or aspectual, and Vendler's subsequent adoption of the term achievement for the aktionsart of momentary events changes the term - Rylean achievements and Vendlerian achievements are in principle different classes. Nevertheless, (...) I shall argue in this paper that certain kinds of quasi-duality do have aspectual significance. This paper examines a number of quasi-dual predicates which are not generally discussed in the aktionsart literature, including break a promise, miscount, and cure the patient. Two types of quasi-dual predicates are identified and dubbed criterion predicates and causative upshot predicates. It is shown that both types of quasi-dual predicate lack process progressives, despite being durative, and it is argued that the lack of process progressives identifies these predicates as (aspectual) achievements. They are termed durative achievements to distinguish them from canonical, momentary achievements. It is argued that these predicates lack process progressives, and hence are achievements, because they express individual-level predicates on the event argument. A process progressive is stage-level for the event, and hence is incompatible with a predicate which is lexically individual-level for the event. (shrink)

It should surprise no one familiar with the problems in rural healthcare that 87% of a randomly selected sample of Nebraskans recently called for either fundamental or complete change of the healthcare system. Rural communities in the United, States have been hard hit by the rising cost of healthcare at a time of economic and demographic decline. Unable to sustain operating costs and personnel needs, rural hospitals and medical, practices have been forced to close their doors at an, alarming rate.Furthermore, (...) rural patients are decreasingly able to afford what services are available to them. Most must purchase insurance privately because they are unlikely to be insured through employment. Therefore, they pay dearly because they are not eligible for corporate rates and because insurance companies use experience instead of community rating to assess risk. (shrink)

In his published texts and lectures on moral philosophy, Kant repeatedly singles out gratitude for discussion. Nevertheless, puzzles about the derivation, content, and nature of this duty remain. This paper seeks to solve some of these puzzles. Centrally, I argue that it is essential to attend to a distinction that Kant makes between well-wishing benevolence (Wohlwollen) and active beneficence (Wohlthun) on the part of a benefactor. On the Kantian account, I argue, a different type of gratitude is owed in response (...) to each. With this distinction in place, I argue further that we can construct what many have thought to be missing from Kant’s discussion of gratitude – an argument explicating the precise contradiction generated by a maxim of ingratitude. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways in which a fuller attention to suffering in the tradition of the early Frankfurt School might valuably inform international political thought. Recent poststructural writing argues that trauma is silenced to prevent it disrupting narratives of order and progress and instead advocates a continual ‘encircling’ of trauma that refuses incorporation into a broader historical narrative. This paper welcomes this challenge to mainstream international ethics: attention to particular suffering provides an important challenge to the abstraction, instrumentalism and (...) universalism of modernity. However, if we simply mark trauma and refuse to incorporate it into any kind of narrative, we cannot profit from the ways in which suffering can illuminate the structures and ways of thinking that create it. Drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics, the paper argues that a dialectical understanding of the relationship between universalising order and disrupting particularity can lead from individual suffering towards a political re-engagement with the universal. (shrink)

I present a problem for an influential argument of Chen Lai's, and argue that Wang Yangming may have believed that all "motivating concerns" are actions. (The archived version is a Chinese preprint; the published Chinese version is available by the external link in the entry. An English version is available on my website.).

The work of the French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy shares with the thinkers of the ‘theological turn in phenomenology’ the programmatic desire to place the ‘theological’, in the broad sense of rethinking the religious traditions in our secular time, back on the agenda of critical thought. Like those advocating a theological turn in phenomenology, Nancy’s deconstructive approach to philosophical analysis aims to develop a new sensibility for the other, for transcendence, conceptualized as the non-apparent in the realm of appearing phenomena. This (...) is why Nancy launches a project looking for the ‘unthought’ and unexpected within the Christian traditions, called deconstruction of Christianity. However, the deconstructive approach to the non-apparent differs fundamentally from that of the thinkers of the turn (1) in its being non-apologetic and non-restorative with regard to religion, because it starts from a problematization of the—typically modern, that is romantic—desire to defend and protect what would be ‘lost’ and possibly to restore this, (2) in its focus on the complex difference-at-work (différance) between religion and secularism, a difference that can be termed entanglement and complicity between these two, (3) in its hypothesis that this entanglement is essentially one between (the meaning and experience of, the rituality around) presence and absence in modern culture, (4) in its conviction that the philosophy and history of culture must join, support, complete and maybe even turn around phenomenology when dealing with the difficult task of determining what exactly would be ‘left’ of the ‘theological’ in our time. In this article, both positions are compared and confronted further, leading to an account of Nancy’s re-readings of the Christian legacy (its theology, doctrine, art, rituals etc.), and ending in a more detailed, exemplary inquiry into the tension between distance and proximity, characteristic of the Christian God. (shrink)

The British Parliament stated that health services would be covered by the Disability Discrimination Act 1995 . However, when people with disabilities are at their most vulnerable, for example when in hospital or subject to medical procedures, the antidiscrimination law fails them. A review of cases indicates that when people with disabilities are subject to medical treatment, the legislative protections are allowed to vanish. Instead, medical decisions are justified on obscure notions such as “best interests”, often with irreversible or even (...) terminal results. This article examines the relevant provisions and limitations of the act, the features of notable non-treatment decisions, and the act's potential to guide future decision making. It argues that antidiscrimination legislation should be assertively applied to protect vulnerable people. (shrink)

I respond to P. J. Ivanhoe's criticisms of my translation of a key passage in Wang Yangming.

A translation of two untranslated epistolary exchanges of Wang Yangming, which provide a record of how he understood the doctrine of the unity of knowledge and action after 1521.

As the structure of healthcare delivery undergoes a breathtaking transformation, many ethics committees are wondering how and if they will be affected. Although the impact has not yet been widely felt, hospital-based ethics committees cannot avoid the pressures and upheaval caused by the reorganization of healthcare. This article will briefly review some of the factors contributing to the transformation of medicine, and suggest a number of ways in which ethics committees can respond proactively.

Knížka je určena každému, kdo se zajímá o logickou stavbu a základy matematiky a o začátky moderní matematické logiky. Aniž předpokládala zvláštních věcných znalostí, navazujíc na tradiční středoškolskou logiku, přibližuje čtenáři výraz a methodu logiky moderní. V podstatě jde o řešení dvou otázek: jak se odvozují matematické věty a jaké jsou logické základy matematiky. Probírá spojování výroků, výrokové vzorce, obecné a existenční výroky, logickou dedukci adruhy důkazů, některé matematické pojmy (množina, vztah, zobrazení, funkce), definice a jejich vlastnosti i systémy axiomů (...) a požadavky, jež na ně klademe. (shrink)