Conceptual analysis is undergoing a revival in philosophy, and much of the credit goes to Frank Jackson. Jackson argues that conceptual analysis is needed as an integral component of so-called serious metaphysics and that it also does explanatory work in accounting for such phenomena as categorization, meaning change, communication, and linguistic understanding. He even goes so far as to argue that opponents of conceptual analysis are implicitly committed to it in practice. We show that he is wrong on all of (...) these points and that his case for conceptual analysis doesn't succeed. At the same time, we argue that the sorts of intuitions that figure in conceptual analysis may still have a significant role to play in philosophy. So naturalists needn't disregard intuitions altogether. (shrink)

In virtue of what do the utterances we make mean what they do? What facts about these signs, about us, and about our environment make it the case that they have the meanings they do? According to a tradition stemming from H.P. Grice through David Lewis and Stephen Schiffer it is in virtue of facts about conventions that we participate in as language users that our utterances mean what they do (see Gr'ice 1957, Lewis 1969, 1983, Schiffer 1972, 1982). This (...) view currently enjoys widespread acceptance among philosophers of mind and language. Though most are not particularly interested in the details of such programs, the dominant view seems to be that something of the sort proposed by Grice, Lewis and Schiffer is basically right. Thus, Jerry Fodor, refiecting what I take to be prevalent attitudes in the field, writes. (shrink)

In this paper I present a novel account of achievement and I argue that, all other things being equal, the presence of this particular type of achievement in a person’s life makes that life more meaningful. In arguing for this conclusion, I explore the connections between m-achievements and a person’s self-conception and especially the idea that m-achievements provide a reason for the revision of one’s self-conception.

The clinical ethics literature is striking for the absence of an important genre of scholarship that is common to the literature of clinical medicine: systematic reviews. As a consequence, the field of clinical ethics lacks the internal, corrective effect of review articles that are designed to reduce potential bias. This article inaugurates a new section of the annual "Clinical Ethics" issue of the Journal of Medicine and Philosophy on systematic reviews. Using recently articulated standards for argument-based normative ethics, we provide (...) a systematic review of the literature on concealed medication for the management of psychiatric disorders. Four steps are completed: identify a focused question; conduct a literature search using key terms relevant to the focused question; assess the adequacy of the argument-based methods of the papers identified; and identify conclusions drawn in each paper and whether they apply to the focused question. We identified seven papers and provide an assessment of them. While none of the papers fully meet the standards of argument-based ethics, they did provide rationales for the use of concealed medications, with the important requirement such a practice be accountable in explicit organizational policy to prevent abuse of patients with mental illness or dementia. (shrink)

This volume is a comprehensive survey of contemporary thought on a wide range of issues and provides students with the basic background to current debates in metaphysics.

This essay is a commentary upon "Race and Kant" by Thomas Hill, Jr and Bernard Boxill. They argue that although Kant in his anthropological writings took blacks to be inferior, his moral theory requires that they be shown the proper moral respect since blacks are persons nonetheless. I argue that this argument is sound, because the conception of inferiority that Kant attributed to blacks does not permit showing them the proper moral respect. Imagine a defective Mercedes Benz and a Ford (...) Pinto. These two cars are not inferior in the same sort of way. For Kant, I argue, the inferiority of blacks is more akin to that of a Ford Pinto; for he undoubtedly took blacks to be perpetual children. Chilren are persons, too; however, no one has ever supposed that moral theory applies to children in the full way that it applies to adults. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Laying Medicine Open: Innovative Interaction Between Medicine and the HumanitiesLaurence B. McCullough and Warren Thomas ReichThe past three decades have witnessed the emergence and remarkable success of the fields of bioethics and medical humanities. The intellectual landscape of medicine and that of the humanities have been remarkably altered in the process. Twenty-five to 30 years ago in the United States there existed but a few courses in what came (...) to be called “bioethics” in departments of philosophy, religious studies, and theology in colleges and universities, a handful of programs of teaching in medical schools such as the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston and Pennsylvania State University School of Medicine at Hershey, and but one independent research center (the Hastings Center) and one university-based research center (the Kennedy Institute of Ethics at Georgetown University). Articles on bioethics began to appear in the peer-reviewed medical, nursing, and humanities literature and some books were published. There was only one journal in bioethics, The Hastings Center Report (which consolidated two previously separate journals from the Hastings Center). Graduate programs in bioethics and medical humanities in colleges and universities and fellowship training in bioethics and medical humanities in medical schools did not exist. Very little existed in colleges, universities, and medical schools in other countries. Now, of course, everything is different.Teachers, scholars, and students of bioethics and medical humanities should not take these remarkable changes for granted, for they represent a sustained and innovative interaction between medicine and the humanities. We have chosen the metaphor of “laying medicine open” to characterize the history of bioethics and medical humanities of the past three decades. This surgical metaphor was used in eighteenth-century Britain by a number of writers who wanted to make medical science and practice more accessible to the sick and to the lay public more generally (Lawrence 1975). We use the metaphor to characterize the efforts of teachers and [End Page 1] scholars over the past three decades and more to make the value-laden dimensions of biomedical science and practice and of health care policy more accessible to patients and to the lay public more generally. The result of this laying open of medicine has gone a long way toward bringing closer together the two cultures of science and the humanities that had, as C. P. Snow famously described, become significantly isolated from each otherAlbert Jonsen (1998) has recently contributed the first book-length history of what he calls the “birth” of bioethics, adding to the work of other scholars such as Warren Reich (1994; 1995) and Robert Baker (1993) and, before them, Corrado Viafora (1990) and David Rothman (1991). The articles in this issue of the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal make additional contributions to the developing understanding of the history of the past thirty years of interaction between medicine and the humanities.Laurence McCullough provides an historical context for the three accounts of the recent laying open of medicine that follow. McCullough examines two times in the history of medicine when it has been laid open to accountability (in addition to its being laid open to and by bioethics and medical humanities). The first laying open occurred in the work of the eighteenth-century Scottish physician and philosopher John Gregory, who set out to create a profession of medicine in a true moral sense of a fiduciary profession by making medicine accountable for its scientific and moral quality. The second occurred in the late twentieth century in which the managed practice of medicine in general, and managed care in particular, have begun to lay medicine open to accountability for its scientific and moral quality, as well as its cost and, at least in the public sector, its accessibility. McCullough argues that, just as Gregory responded to the ethical challenges of medicine laid open more than two centuries ago, bioethics should respond to the ethical challenges in the current laying open of medicine.Warren Reich provides an account of André Hellegers, whose premature death left an enormous gap in the field that will never be filled. Reich claims that Hellegers was engaged substantially in much more than the laying open of medicine: he... (shrink)

Taking the critical turn is one of the main tools of the humanities and inculcates an intellectual discipline that prevents ossification of thinking about issues and of organizational policies in clinical ethics. The articles in this "Clinical Ethics" number of the Journal take the critical turn with respect to cherished ways of thinking in Western clinical ethics, life extension, the clinical determination of death, physicians' duty to treat even at personal risk, clinical ethics at the interface of research ethics, and (...) the pertinence of the Hippocratic Oath to clinical ethics. These articles challenge clinical ethicists to inculcate the intellectual discipline of the critical turn into everyday practice and continuous quality enhancement of clinical ethics. (shrink)

Volume 20, Issue 3, March 2020, Page 65-68.

In this book, controversial topics such as the morality of abortion, withdrawing treatment from handicapped newborns, the role of ethics committees, diagnosing death, withdrawing food and fluids and giving lethal injections are discussed. It proposes model legislation to prevent abuse and neglect of the medically vulnerable and dependent, and in a piercing and insightful manner, Fr. Barry critically evaluates many contemporary views on these topics, arguing forcefully for a reappraisal of many popular views on these topics.

The Meditative Way - Readings in the theory and practice of Buddhist meditation. Ed. by Rod Bucknell and Chris Kang. Curzon Press, Richmond 1997. x, 274 pp. Cloth £40, pbk £14.99. ISBN 0-7007-0677-1/0678-X.

The Tale of Prince Samuttakote. A Buddhist Epic from Thailand. Trans. Thomas John Hudak. Ohio University 1993. xxix, 276 pp. + 6 b/w plates. Pbk $20.00, £14.95.

The Unexpected Way. On Converting from Buddhism to Catholicism. Paul Williams. Continuum, London/New York 2002. Pb. xx, 240 pp. £12.99. ISBN 0 567 08830 8.

Romane Clark has complained of the dissimilarity between Sellars’s treatment of conceptual thought and his treatment of sense impressions. For sense impressions are intrinsic to perceptions and, on Sellars’s view, both conceptual thought and perception are species of judgment. In the first section of this paper I want to raise a converse sort of complaint: Sellars offers an ‘adverbial’ theory of sense impressions and a similar account of conceptual thought. But this similarity of treatment is not justified by what Sellars (...) says in its defence. If the adverbial theory of conceptual thought is true, as I believe it is, then a number of consequences, important for the philosophy of action, follow. Sellars traces some of these in his paper “Metaphysics and the Concept of a Person.” It would be desirable, therefore, if the adverbial theory of conceptual thought could be made secure. This is attempted in the second section and, in conclusion, the power of the theory is exhibited by directing it briefly at a long-standing problem in the philosophy of logic. (shrink)

Paradigme même du diagramme, l’arbre a fait l’objet des convocations les plus variées dans des domaines et aux fins les plus diverses : outil mnémotechnique, modèle d’organisation de la connaissance, hiérarchies conceptuelles, relations généalogiques, processus héréditaires, modélisation de l’histoire ou de l’évolution naturelle, etc. De l’arbre de Porphyre à l’arbre des encyclopédistes, de l’arbre darwinien de la vie aux arbres de l’histoire littéraire de Franco Moretti, les diagrammes arborescents témoignent d’une capacité apparemment infinie à se laisser réactiver pour délivrer des (...) potentiels inédits, quitte parfois à faire émerger des contre-figures comme le rhizome de Deleuze et Guattari, ou encore le corail de Darwin. Cette capacité de métamorphose de l’arbre, qui est explorée ici, explique pourquoi il est souvent considéré comme le diagramme des diagrammes. (shrink)

This dissertation advances a solution to a problem intrinsic to understanding the dialogues of Plato. How are we to understand Plato's thought when he never speaks in his own name in any of his dialogues? Many writers assume that Plato's characters speak for him. With this assumption, they study the thought articulated by Plato's characters as if it were his own, and elaborate a so-called "doctrinal" interpretation. A variety of subjective readings follows, since what Socrates and other characters say in (...) the dialogues is often inconsistent or contradictory. To resolve these problems the dissertation constructs a method for interpreting Socratic dialogue which is true to the genre. Extending the work of Bakhtin, Clay, and Kahn, it develops a metalanguage for specifying the structure, plot, aim , and effect of a dialogue as well as the thought , character , and pathos of its participants, by applying concepts in Plato's dialogues and in Aristotle's Poetics, Ethics, Politics, Metaphysics, Physics, and other works. The dissertation shows that the Republic represents Glaucon as subject to erotic desire and desires for luxury and honor, and that the aim of Socrates' discourse is to induce a catharsis in Glaucon in order to change these states of character. ;To support this interpretation, the dissertation shows: Aristotle does not apply a doctrinal reading to Plato's dialogues; he does not attribute the remarks of the character Socrates to Plato. Irwin's claims in "Plato's Ethics" are not supported by the texts of Aristotle which he cites. Aristotle's treatment of the Republic in Politics II is consistent with a mimetic interpretation of the dialogue. His treatment of the Republic is peirastic: he refutes Socrates' proposals with premisses and arguments that Socrates himself expresses in the dialogue. The dissertation discusses Aristotle's treatment of Socrates' proposals for unity in the city of the guardians, the sharing of women and children, gender, sacrilegious acts and incest, property, and the minimum necessary elements for a city. Aristotle's concept of catharsis can be derived from Sophist 230 and Republic X. (shrink)

Face à sa finitude, l'homme est désemparé. Il aborde l'existence par la question du " pourquoi ". " Pourquoi m'a-t-on donné la vie si c'est pour la reprendre? " Il est envahi par la colère, la révolte... puis, il cherche un sens à sa mort et pose un au-delà salvateur, un lieu où tout peut continuer autrement... ou encore il envisage une réincarnation; bref, quelque chose qui n'est plus " la fin de la fin ". Mais quand l'homme se fait (...) philosophe, comment appréhende-t-il cette idée qui sera aussi sa réalité ultime? (shrink)

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) show a protracted period of inconsistent use of tense/agreement morphemes. The purpose of this investigation was to determine whether this inconsistent use could be attributed to the children's misinterpretations of particular syntactic structures in the input. In Study 1, preschool-aged children with SLI and typically developing peers heard sentences containing novel verbs preceded by auxiliarywasor sentences in which the novel verb formed part of a nonfinite subject-verb sequence within a larger syntactic structure (e.g.We saw (...) the dog relling). The children were then tested on their use of the novel verbs in contexts that obligated use of auxiliaryis. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and more likely to produce the novel verb withoutisif the verb had been heard in a nonfinite subject-verb sequence. In Study 2, children with SLI and typically developing peers were tested on their comprehension of sentences such asThe cow sees the horse eating. The children with SLI were less accurate than their peers and were disproportionately influenced by the nonfinite subject-verb clause at the end of the sentence. We interpret these findings within the framework of construction learning. (shrink)

À la fois omniprésent et incernable, le temps est une dimension omniprésente de nos existences, indissociable de notre rapport au cosmos, à la vie biologique, à la conscience mais aussi à l’histoire, à la culture et à la société. Parce qu’elle est au confluent de plusieurs champs d’expérience et de réflexion, la question du temps offre une passerelle privilégiée pour croiser des approches rarement invitées à se rencontrer : celles des sciences d’un côté (physique, biologie, médecine, cosmologie), celles des arts (...) de l’autre (littérature, cinéma, arts plastiques, musique, théâtre). Au-delà des questions qui touchent à la réorganisation des partages cognitifs et disciplinaires (entre sciences et arts), l’objectif de cet ouvrage est de montrer la fécondité des transferts épistémologiques entre ces deux domaines. D’un côté, les sciences constituent un réservoir inépuisable pour les arts, auxquels elles proposent une multiplicité de modèles du temps opérant à différentes échelles : temporalités non linéaires, réversibles, cycliques ou emboîtées, qui peuvent être dynamisées par des bifurcations, des catastrophes ou des phénomènes d’émergence imprévisibles. De l’autre, les arts sont un lieu privilégié de modélisation, d’exposition et de mise à l’épreuve de modèles temporels, qui tantôt croisent la rationalité dominante (sciences, historiographie), tantôt en réactivent des dimensions occultées (mythe, rite, etc.). Frayant à la fois dans l’imaginaire et le rationnel, ces représentations du temps permettent d’exhiber la complexité d’un phénomène qui ne peut être appréhendé que dans l’entre-deux des savoirs et des arts. (shrink)

La société chinoise aujourd’hui peut être définie comme produisant différentes formes de compressed modernities où se contractent et s’entrelacent des temporalités historiques, sociales, politiques, économiques, mais aussi individuelles et collectives. Nous introduisons ici la notion de temporalité « contractée » qui favorise la superposition, l’intensification et la multiplication de risques sociaux, économiques, écologiques et sanitaires. Temporalités et espaces s’agencent en Chine de manière flagrante dans la production de mobilités, migrations et circulations très intenses aujourd’hui. La conquête de soi apparaît comme (...) une question d’intensité liée à l’accélération des temporalités sociales et économiques objectives et subjectives ; se construit alors la figure d’un Individu compressé dans la société chinoise. Les temporalités collectives favorisent des micromobilisations où s’ouvrent des micro-arènes publiques et où se construit, en contexte autoritaire, de la démocratie « par le bas ». (shrink)

The concept of meaning, since Frege initiated the linguistic turn in 1884, has been the subject of numerous theories, hypotheses, methodologies and distinctions. One distinction of considerable strategic value relates to the location of meaning: some aspects of meaning can be found in language and are modelled with semantic values of various kinds; some aspects of meaning can be found in communicative processes and are modelled with pragmatic inferences of one sort or another. One hypothesis of great heuristic utility concerns (...) the relationship that is assumed between the semantic and the pragmatic. This collection of especially commissioned papers examines current thinking on the plausible nature of the semantic, the possible character of the pragmatic and the mechanics of their intersection. (shrink)

Face à la question des modes de distribution inégalitaire de l’honneur social et de la lutte pour la reconnaissance chez des populations objets de mépris social, le « savoir-être avec » l’Autre est devenu pour le sociologue un enjeu scientifique, méthodologique et épistémologique important. Est proposée ici une ethnographie de la reconnaissance où l’Autre est regardé et reconnu avec son expérience, sa compétence, et son identité plurielle, fluctuante, réversible, inscrit dans une diversité de mondes sociaux organisée par des processus culturels (...) producteurs de hiérarchies et d’inégalités.When faced with unequal forms of distribution of social honour and with the struggle for recognition among populations subject to social contempt, knowing how to be with the Other has become a major methodological and epistemological scientific issue. Here, we are proposing an ethnography of recognition, in which the Other is regarded and recognized with his experience, his competence, and his fluctuating, reversible and varied identity, anchored in a diversity of social worlds organized on the basis of structural processes which produce hierarchy and inequalities. (shrink)

. reh S.ni a Paul Rieoeur. hfFerem ï penenee i in ree PEE TERS.LEI \ IN PEETERS.