A SECOND COMPLETELY REVISED EDITION OF THIS TEXTBOOK ON INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH WAS PUBLISHED WITH AMSTERDAM UNIVERSITY PRESS IN 2022. Check out that version here and a PDF of its ToC and Introduction, as this first edition (AUP 2016) is no longer available. [This book (128 pp.) serves as an introduction and manual to guide students through the interdisciplinary research process. We are becoming increasingly aware that, as a result of technological developments and globalisation, problems are becoming so complex that they (...) can only be solved through cooperation between multiple disciplines. Healthcare, climate change, food security, energy, financial markets and quality of life are just a few examples of issues that require scientists and academics to work in a crossdisciplinary way. As a result of these developments, an interdisciplinary approach is becoming increasingly popular in higher education and must be considered an absolute necessity. Young academics are being called on to step beyond the boundaries of traditional disciplines in order to contribute to addressing fundamental problems and solving challenges facing society. There is a need for people who are not afraid to ask critical questions, who can work together well and can look beyond the boundaries of their own field. This means students need to learn more about how they can integrate and apply knowledge, methods and skills from different fields. Interdisciplinary research projects and practical training courses offer students more than one perspective on the same subject. Comparing and contrasting, connecting, adding and adapting concepts, theories and methodologies from different disciplines ultimately results in new insights and better answers to complex problems.]. (shrink)

This article defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes’s head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what’s true in a work of fiction. This article argues that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. It contrasts this view with one of the dominant (...) approaches to fictional truth, which originates with David Lewis. Along the way it explores the relationship between fiction, counterfactuals, and vagueness. (shrink)

Patient requests for a healthcare provider of a particular race or sexual orientation create a conflict of obligations. On the one hand, providers have a duty to deliver clinically indicated care consistent with patient preferences. On the other hand, providers have legal, professional, and organizational assurances that they should not suffer workplace discrimination. Protecting healthcare providers from harm while maintaining obligations to patients requires unambiguous messaging to both parties. Providers need to be clear that their organization will not be complicit (...) in discrimination against them, instead supporting their needs and preferences for management of the situation. In a context of patient-centered care, harm principle-based boundaries of respect for autonomy must be defined. A Caregiver preference guideline developed and used at University Health Network, Toronto provides a standardized way for the organization to decide when it will honor patient requests for providers of a particular background. This process stresses dialogue, assessment of clinical feasibility, and empowerment and support for affected care providers. (shrink)

Explore the Resistance to Death, and Awaken More Fully to Life Death is simply one more aspect of being a human being, but in our culture, we've made it a taboo. As a result, most of us walk through life with conscious or unconscious fears that prevent us from experiencing true contentment. Embracing the End of Life invites you to lean into your beliefs and questions about death and dying, helping you release tense or fearful energy and awaken to a (...) more vital life now. Preparing mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for this inevitable transition provides improved clarity and strength. This book shares the idea of death as a journey of three steps—resistance, letting go, and transcendence. With dozens of exercises, practices, and meditations, author Patt Lind-Kyle helps you experience your truest, most expansive self. Exploring multiple aspects of life and death—with everything from chakras and the Enneagram to living wills and health care directives—this book is meant to help you unwind the challenge of death and discover the truth of your own path to inner freedom. Praise: "The fear of dying keeps countless people from living fully—as well as keeping countless others trapped in endless suffering. Embracing the End of Life will help all of us prepare joyously for the inevitable."—Christiane Northrup, MD, New York Times bestselling author of Goddesses Never Age Winner of a 2018 Gold IPPY Award. (shrink)

Trust is a central concept in the philosophy of science. We highlight how trust is important in the wide variety of interactions between science and society. We claim that examining and clarifying the nature and role of trust (and distrust) in relations between science and society is one principal way in which the philosophy of science is socially relevant. We argue that philosophers of science should extend their efforts to develop normative conceptions of trust that can serve to facilitate trust (...) between scientific experts and ordinary citizens. The first project is the development of a rich normative theory of expertise and experience that can explain why the various epistemic insights of diverse actors should be trusted in certain contexts and how credibility deficits can be bridged. The second project is the development of concepts that explain why, in certain cases, ordinary citizens may distrust science, which should inform how philosophers of science conceive of the formulation of science policy when conditions of distrust prevail. The third project is the analysis of cases of successful relations of trust between scientists and non-scientists that leads to understanding better how ‘postnormal’ science interactions are possible using trust. (shrink)

Pellegrino and Thomasma have proposed a normative medical ethics founded on a conception of the end of medicine detached from any broader notion of the telos of human life. In this essay, I question whether such a narrow teleological account of medicine can be sustained, taking as a starting point Pellegrino and Thomasma’s own contention that the end of medicine projects itself onto the intermediate acts that aim at that end. In order to show how the final end of human (...) life similarly alters intermediate ends, such as the end of medicine, I describe Thomas Aquinas’s concept of pain and explain how his remedies for pain derive from his account of the telos of human life. In turn, this account has implications for the way in which physicians who accept such a telos would manage their patients’ pain. If a comprehensive telos for human life is necessary to make sense of even such a routine aspect of medical care, then medical ethicists may not be able to sidestep questions about the good life for human beings. (shrink)

Several writers have argued that the state lacks the moral standing to hold socially deprived offenders responsible for their crimes because the state would be hypocritical in doing so. Yet the state is not disposed to make an unfair exception of itself for committing the same sorts of crimes as socially deprived offenders, so it is unclear that the state is truly hypocritical. Nevertheless, the state is disposed to inconsistently hold its citizens responsible, blaming or punishing socially deprived offenders more (...) often or more harshly than other offenders, even when the crimes are the same. The state’s stable disposition to inconsistently hold offenders responsible undermines its standing to hold offenders responsible for the same reasons that hypocrisy undermines standing; instead of making an unfair exception of itself, the state makes an unfair exception of others. Strikingly, this means that the state lacks the standing to hold anyone responsible for a crime for which it is unfairly disposed to hold citizens responsible inconsistently, not just socially deprived offenders. Thus, it is even more urgent that the state regain its moral standing by working toward a justice system that holds offenders responsible consistently. (shrink)

Ideas for How to Take Wicked Problems Seriously Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s10806-011-9348-9 Authors Kyle Powys Whyte, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Paul B. Thompson, Department of Philosophy, Michigan State University, 503 S. Kedzie Hall, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA Journal Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics Online ISSN 1573-322X Print ISSN 1187-7863.

Every well-read architect in the English-speaking world will soon be familiar with the name of Uriel Birnbaum. For this he will have to thank a philosopher: a German philosopher, the provocative and prolific Peter Sloterdijk1—author of “the best-selling German book of philosophy since World War II,”2 the Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, or Critique of Cynical Reason. But Sloterdijk’s more recent 1998–2004 magnum opus, the three-volume, 2,573-page Sphären, or Spheres, has not yet been fully translated into English. This itself will prove (...) no insignificant task; the book has been variously described as “expansive,” “majestic,” “epic,” “monumental,” and even “megalomaniac,”3 and thus far only the first volume .. (shrink)

Educational Theory, Volume 71, Issue 3, Page 353-370, June 2021.

Matthew usually handles his fulfilment quotations in such a way that the scriptural words are fulfilled in the events that are narrated immediately before a quotation, at least primarily or in the sense of making a later complete fulfilment possible. Another characteristic is that normally the entire scriptural passage as quoted by Matthew is fulfilled. At first sight, it seems to be very difficult to explain the long fulfilment quotation from Isa. 42:1-4 in a way that meets both standards. Scholars (...) either perceive only a very limited fulfilment in what precedes or they recognize the elements from the quotation all over Matthew 12. In this article, it is explored whether due attention to Matthew’s redactional emphases in the immediately preceding narrative may help to explain the quotation in such a way that it meets Matthew’s normal way of using fulfilment quotations. In the preceding narrative, the evangelist introduces Jesus’ awareness of the plan of the Pharisees to destroy him. In Matthew’s view, Jesus withdraws because the appointed time for the execution of their plan has not yet come . The subsequent command, to those whom Jesus has healed, “not to make him known” has to be interpreted along the same line: Jesus’ true identity as the Christ and the Son of God can be made known only after the execution of the plan of the Pharisees . The quotation from Isaiah has then been fulfilled in the narrative of Matt. 12:14-16 in the following way: Matthew recognizes Jesus’ true identity, including his significance for the Gentiles, in 12:18; Jesus’ response to the Pharisees and their response to him in 12:19; his healing activity in 12:20ab; his death and resurrection as the realization of justice, again in connection with his significance for the Gentiles, in 12:20c-21. Even here, Matthew has carefully attuned quotation and preceding context to each other. The unusual traits of the function and size of the quotation are due to the circumstance that in the preceding context, Jesus’ death on the cross comes explicitly into view for the first time in Matthew. (shrink)

Whereas bioethicists generally consider medicine a practice aimed at the individual good of each patient, in this paper I present an alternative conception of the goods of medicine. I first explain how modern liberal political theory gives rise to the predominant view of the medical good and then contrast this understanding of politics with that of Thomas Aquinas, informed by Aristotle. I then show how this Christian politics is implicit in certain aspects of contemporary medical practice and argue that Christians (...) ought to draw more attention to this point in order to direct medicine toward the common good. (shrink)

In the concluding chapter of Exceeding our Grasp Kyle Stanford outlines a positive response to the central issue raised brilliantly by his book, the problem of unconceived alternatives. This response, called "epistemic instrumentalism", relies on a distinction between instrumental and literal belief. We examine this distinction and with it the viability of Stanford's instrumentalism, which may well be another case of exceeding our grasp.

ObjectivePeer victimization is a substantial early life stressor linked to psychiatric symptoms and poor academic performance. However, the sex-specific cognitive or behavioral outcomes of bullying have not been well-described in preadolescent children.MethodsUsing the baseline dataset of the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study 2.0.1 data repository, we evaluated associations between parent-reported bullying victimization, suicidality, and non-suicidal self-injury, as well as internalizing and externalizing behavioral problems, cognition, and academic performance.ResultsOf the 11,015 9-10-year-old children included in the analyses, 15.3% experienced bullying victimization, as (...) reported by the primary caregiver. Of these, boys were more likely to be bullied than girls. Children who were bullied were more likely to display NSSI or passive suicidality and active suicidality. Bullied children also had lower cognitive scores, greater behavioral problems, and poorer grades. Across all participants, boys had poorer grades and greater behavioral problems than girls; however, bullied boys had greater behavioral problems than girls in several areas. Compared to their non-bullied peers, bullied children with greater non-suicidal self-injury or suicidality also had greater behavioral problems and poorer grades.ConclusionThese findings highlight the sex-specific effects of bullying, and the negative associations of bullying victimization with cognitive performance, behavioral problems, and academic performance. Future longitudinal studies will identify the natural history and neural correlates of these deficits during adolescence. (shrink)

ABSTRACTPolitical reconciliation between Indigenous peoples and settler nations is among the major ethical issues of the twenty-first century for millions of Indigenous peoples globally. Political reconciliation refers to the aspiration to transform violent and harmful relationships into respectful relationships. This essay discusses how efforts to achieve reconciliation are not feasible when settler nations and some of their citizens believe Indigenous peoples to be clamoring for undeserved privileges. Settler colonialism often includes the illusion that historic and contemporary settler populations have moral (...) grounds for their mistreatment of Indigenous peoples. This illusion masks historical and ongoing practices of settler colonialism that thwart effective practices of reconciliation. (shrink)

Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein (2008) contend that mandated choice is the most practical nudge for increasing organ donation. We argue that they are wrong, and their mistake results from failing to appreciate how perceptions of meaning can influence people's responses to nudges. We favor a policy of default to donation that is subject to immediate family veto power, includes options for people to opt out (and be educated on how to do so), and emphasizes the role of organ procurement (...) organizations and in-house transplant donation coordinators creating better environments for increasing the supply of organs and tissues obtained from cadavers. This policy will provide better opportunities for offering nudges in contexts where in-house coordinators work with families. We conclude by arguing that nudges can be introduced ethically and effectively into these contexts only if nudge designers collaborate with in-house coordinators and stakeholders. (shrink)

Anonymized reflection was employed as an innovative way of teaching ethics in order to enhance students' ability in ethical decision making during a `Care of the Dying Patient and Family' module. Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected from the first two student cohorts who experienced anonymized reflection ( n = 24). The themes identified were the richness and relevance of scenarios, small-group work and a team approach to teaching. Students indicated that they preferred this style of teaching. This finding (...) was verified by a postal questionnaire conducted four months later. The conclusions drawn from this study suggest that using anonymized reflection is an effective method for teaching ethics to nurses and indicates that learning about ethical issues in this way reduces uncertainties. (shrink)

This article provides practical guidance for researchers who wish to enroll and collect data from pediatric research participants through online and mobile platforms, with a focus on the involvement of both children and their parents in the decision to participate.

Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics, his metatheory, and his transcendental phenomenology have a sophisticated and systematic interrelation that remains relevant for questions of ontology today. It is well established that Husserl anticipated many aspects of model theory. I focus on this aspect of Husserl’s philosophy in order to argue that Thomasson’s recent pleonastic reconstruction of Husserl’s approach to essences is incompatible with Husserl’s philosophy as a whole. According to the pleonastic approach, Husserl can appeal to essences in the absence of a (...) positive metaphysical account of their nature. I show, using central results from recent model theory, that the pleonastic approach undermines Husserl’s approach to formalization and categoricity, an effect that will ripple out from Husserl’s philosophy of mathematics into Husserl’s metatheory and transcendental phenomenology. The result is that Husserl cannot appeal to formal essences without metaphysical commitments. However, the very observations Thomasson makes about the nature of eidetic intuition in Husserl lead to a general strategy for responding to the problem. The article thus illustrates that the pleonastic and the model-theoretic routes for making Husserl relevant to present-day ontology are competing approaches, but I conclude that Husserl scholars seeking to set Husserl’s present-day relevance into sharp relief could do worse than to emphasize the model-theoretic nature of Husserl’s enterprise. (shrink)

Hypocrites are often thought to lack the standing to blame others for faults similar to their own. Although this claim is widely accepted, it is seldom argued for. We offer an argument for the claim that nonhypocrisy is a necessary condition on the standing to blame. We first offer a novel, dispositional account of hypocrisy. Our account captures the commonsense view that hypocrisy involves making an unjustified exception of oneself. This exception-making involves a rejection of the impartiality of morality and (...) thereby a rejection of the equality of persons, which we argue grounds the standing to blame others. (shrink)

A growing number of epistemologists have endorsed the Ignorance Norm for Inquiry. Roughly, this norm says that one should not inquire into a question unless one is ignorant of its answer. I argue that, in addition to ignorance, proper inquiry requires a certain kind of knowledge. Roughly, one should not inquire into a question unless one knows it has a true answer. I call this the Knowledge Norm for Inquiry. Proper inquiry walks a fine line, holding knowledge that there is (...) an answer in the left hand and ignorance of the answer in the right. (shrink)

I give an account of the compositional semantics of unconditionals that explains their relationship to if -conditionals in the Lewis/Kratzer/Heim tradition. Unconditionals involve an alternative-denoting adjunct that supplies domain restrictions pointwise to a main-clause operator such as a modal. The differences from if -clauses follow from the structure of the adjuncts; both are conditionals in the Lewisian sense. In the course of treating unconditionals, I provide a concrete implementation of conditionals where conditional adjuncts in general are a species of correlative, (...) and show what detaching this hypothesis from if involves. (shrink)

Digital and social media have transformed how much and how fast we communicate, but they have also altered the palette of expressive strategies: the cultural forms that shape how citizens, activists, and artists speak and interact. In A Theory of Assembly, Kyle Parry argues that one of the most powerful and pervasive cultural forms in the digital era is assembly.

Venturing into novel terrain poses physical risks to a female and her offspring. Females have a greater tendency to avoid physical harm, while males tend to have larger range sizes and often outperform females in navigation-related tasks. Given this backdrop, we expected that females would explore a novel environment with more caution than males, and that more-cautious exploration would negatively affect navigation performance. Participants explored a novel, large-scale, virtual environment in search of five objects, pointed in the direction of each (...) object from the origin, and then navigated back to the objects. We found that females demonstrated more caution while exploring as reflected in the increased amounts of pausing and revisiting of previously traversed locations. In addition, more pausing and revisiting behaviors led to degradation in navigation performance. Finally, individual levels of trait harm avoidance were positively associated with the amount of revisiting behavior during exploration. These findings support the idea that the fitness costs associated with long-distance travel may encourage females to take a more cautious approach to spatial exploration, and that this caution may partially explain the sex differences in navigation performance. (shrink)

ABSTRACTThis article investigates Rancière’s understanding of the Heideggerean conception of art. It argues that Rancière is mistaken in categorizing Heidegger’s philosophy of art within the ethical regime of images, and further that his work corresponds with the central tenets of, and thus should be categorized within, the aesthetic regime of art. This is because art is understood as art, for Heidegger, when it instigates strife between world—the network of associations which constitute the horizons of a given population’s perceptual, conceptual and (...) motor possibilities—and earth—the necessarily resistant to explicit conscious acts and signification. Insofar as it is constituted by this dual relation, art puts forth a dialogically open space in which it paradoxically reinforces the boundaries of seeing, thinking and doing, yet remains heterogeneous to these modes, thereby preventing art from being reducible to the everyday. This paradoxical role, this articulation and reconfiguration that establishes a unified-character of the arts for Heidegger, performs a function that is best framed within the aesthetic redistribution-based transformative conception of art. This is because in both Heidegger and the aesthetic regime, the dialogically open space granted to art allows for cultural revolutions and paradigm shifts to take place in an indeterminable manner. (shrink)

In Nishida Kitarō's Philosophy of Life, Tatsuya Higaki offers a highly novel and compelling reading of Nishida's philosophy by placing it in dialogue with the life philosophy of Henri Bergson and Gilles Deleuze. The philosophical core of the book consists of six chapters, chronologically proceeding from Nishida's early work on "pure experience" in 1911, through middle and late-middle period concepts like "self-awareness," "place," "absolute nothingness," and "acting intuition," and finally to his late-period work on "absolute contradictory selfidentity" before his death (...) in 1945. Despite this terminological diversity, Higaki reads such "slogans" together in terms of Nishida's more fundamental orientation towards... (shrink)

Despite recent controversies surrounding the principle that knowledge entails truth (KT), this paper aims to prove that the principle is true. It offers a proof of (KT) in the following sense. It advances a deductively valid argument for (KT), whose premises are, by most lights, obviously true. Moreover, each premise is buttressed by at least two supporting arguments. And finally, all premises and supporting arguments can be rationally accepted by people who don’t already accept (KT).

Ethicists are typically willing to grant that thick terms (e.g. ‘courageous’ and ‘murder’) are somehow associated with evaluations. But they tend to disagree about what exactly this relationship is. Does a thick term’s evaluation come by way of its semantic content? Or is the evaluation pragmatically associated with the thick term (e.g. via conversational implicature)? In this paper, I argue that thick terms are semantically associated with evaluations. In particular, I argue that many thick concepts (if not all) conceptually entail (...) evaluative contents. The Semantic View has a number of outspoken critics, but I shall limit discussion to the most recent--Pekka Väyrynen--who believes that objectionable thick concepts present a problem for the Semantic View. After advancing my positive argument in favor of the Semantic View (section II), I argue that Väyrynen’s attack is unsuccessful (section III). One reason ethicists cite for not focusing on thick concepts is that such concepts are supposedly not semantically evaluative whereas traditional thin concepts (e.g. good and wrong) are. But if my view is correct, then this reason must be rejected. (shrink)

Although many people choose to sign consent forms and participate in research, how many thoroughly read a consent form before signing it? Across 3 experiments using 348 undergraduate student participants, we examined whether personality characteristics as well as consent form content, format, and delivery method were related to thorough reading. Students repeatedly failed to read the consent forms, although small effects were found favoring electronic delivery methods and traditional format forms. Potential explanations are discussed and include participant apathy, participants trying (...) to save time by not reading the consent form, and participant assumptions about consent forms. (shrink)

In this chapter, Kyle Ferguson argues for an individualist account of Sellarsian we-intentions. According to the individualist account, we-intentions’ intersubjective form renders them shareable rather than requiring that they be shared. Contrary to collectivist accounts, one may we-intend independently of whether and without presupposing that one's community shares one's we-intentions. After providing textual support, Ferguson proposes and implements a strategy of reportorial ascent, which strengthens the case for the individualist account. Reportorial ascent involves reflecting on the sentences one would (...) use to report or self-ascribe we-intentions. As Ferguson argues, we-intention-reporting sentences have ‘I’ as their subjects, which reveals that their truth conditions, like the performance conditions of their expressive counterparts, are satisfied by the individual who reports or expresses those intentions rather than by the host community. We-intention-reporting sentences, which make explicit both dimensions of independence and shareability, also reveal that intersubjective form is a feature of we-intentions qua mental states rather than a feature of their contents. Ferguson concludes that although the individualist account needs further development, the sketch provided in this chapter is compelling enough to demand that individualism and independence be moved from the periphery to the core of our study of we-intentions in Sellars's practical philosophy. (shrink)

The current literature on norms of inquiry features two families of norms: norms that focus on an inquirer’s ignorance and norms that focus on the question’s soundness. I argue that, given a factive conception of ignorance, it’s possible to derive a soundness-style norm from a version of the ignorance norm. A crucial lemma in the argument is that just as one can only be ignorant of a proposition if the proposition is true, so one can only be ignorant with respect (...) to a question if the question is sound. (shrink)

Kriegel has revived adverbialism as a theory of consciousness. But recent attacks have shed doubt on the viability of the theory. To save adverbialism, I propose that the adverbialist take a stance on the nature of adverbial modification. On one leading theory, adverbial modification turns on the instantiation by a substance of a psychological type. But the resulting formulation of adverbialism turns out to be a mere notational variant on the relationalist approaches against which Kriegel dialectically situates adverbialism. By contrast, (...) I argue that the way to be an adverbialist is to adopt an event ontology, emphasizing the active contribution of the mind to the phenomenology of experience. My close examination of the semantics of adverbial modification throws this metaphysical distinction into sharp relief. The event-based semantics overcomes recent objections in a way superior to the methods that would have been obviously available in the absence of a sophisticated semantics. (shrink)

In this paper, I raise a problem for standard precisifications of the Relational Analysis of attitude reports. The problem I raise involves counterfactual attitude verbs. such as ‘wish’. In short, the trouble is this: there are true attitude reports ‘ S wishes that P ’ but there is no suitable referent for the term ‘that P ’. The problematic reports illustrate that the content of a subject’s wish is intimately related to the content of their beliefs. I capture this fact (...) by moving to a framework in which ‘wish’ relates subjects to sets of pairs of worlds, or paired propositions, rather than—as is standardly assumed—sets of worlds. Although other types of counterfactual attitude reports, for example those involving ‘imagine’, may be similarly problematic, at this stage it is unclear whether they can be handled the same way. (shrink)

This chapter is a revealing journey through the world of Pandora and the huge range of philosophical themes raised by James Cameron's groundbreaking film, Avatar. The Na'vi's intimate connection to all life on Pandora makes humanity's vicious attitude toward the natural world unfathomable to them. The insanity of the “sky people” is exemplified by their irrational anthropocentricism, an attitude that has regrettably been prevalent in Western philosophy since the time of the ancient Greeks. The philosopher Aristotle argued in the De (...) anima that every living thing – plant, animal, or human being – possessed a soul; but he deemed the human soul alone to be capable of rational thought. In the final scene of Avatar, Jake attains the pinnacle of seeing by passing through the eye of Eywa and returning to the world of the Na'vi, a feat that perhaps no other living being on Pandora had ever accomplished. (shrink)

Predictions that artificial intelligence (AI) will become capable of replacing human beings in domains such as medicine rest implicitly on a theory of mind according to which knowledge can be captured propositionally without loss of meaning. Generative AIs, for example, draw upon billions of written sources to produce text that most likely responds to a user’s query, according to its probability heuristic. Such programs can only replace human beings in practices such as medicine if human language functions similarly and, like (...) AI, does not rely on meta-textual resources to convey meaning. In this essay, I draw on the hermeneutic philosophy of Hans-Georg Gadamer to challenge this conception of human knowledge. I follow Gadamer in arguing that human understanding of texts is an interpretive process relying on previously received judgments that derive from the human person’s situatedness in history, and these judgments differ from the rules guiding generative AI. Human understanding is also dialogical, as it depends on the ‘fusion of horizons’ with another person to the extent that one’s own prejudices may come under question, something AI cannot achieve. Furthermore, artificial intelligence lacks a human body, which conditions human perception and understanding. I contend that these non-textual sources of meaning, which must remain obscure to AI, are important in moral practices such as medicine, particularly in history-taking, physical examination, diagnostic reasoning, and negotiating a treatment plan. Although AI can undoubtedly aid physicians in certain ways, it faces inherent limitations in replicating these core tasks of the physician–patient relationship. (shrink)

This essay introduces, develops, and appraises the mitonuclear compatibility species concept (MCSC), identifying advantages and limitations with respect to alternative species concepts. While the consensus amongst most philosophers of biology is that (kind) essentialism about species is mistaken, and that species at most have relational essences, we appeal to the MCSC to defend thoroughgoing intrinsic essentialism. Namely, the doctrine that species have fully intrinsic essences and, thus, are natural kinds (of sorts), while allowing that species aren’t categorically distinct.