In 1999, Neale Donald Walsch wrote three little books, each focusing on different areas of life: Neale Donald Walsch on Relationships, Neale Donald Walsch on Holistic Living, and Neale Donald Walsch on Abundance and Right Livelihood. In 2010, these three books were published in a single volume as Neale Donald Walsch's Little Book of Life. Walsch describes this book as a thousand pages of dialogue in the Conversations with God series reduced down to a few salient points and a few (...) very direct observations about how to render them functional. Readers can think of this book as either Conversations with God in a Nutshell or the Essential Conversations with God. Here are the basic principles for: Satisfying personal relationships; Living a joyful, harmonious life; Discovering authentic prosperity. Walsch's words provide hope and help for readers living in particularly challenging times. This is indeed Walsch's essential life guide for twenty-first century readers."--Back cover. (shrink)

First Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Aristotle is no exception in seeing a connection between causation and necessity, and teleological causation is no exception for Aristotle. His discussions of teleology in the Physics and in Parts of Animals i 1 both make this connection explicitly, by presenting final causation as involving necessity ‘from a hypothesis (ex hupotheseôs)’, usually referred to in the literature as ‘hypothetical necessity’. Hypothetical necessity is evidently invoked to express the thought that, given the functions and activities of living things, certain of their (...) features cannot be otherwise. Further, it appears that these necessity claims are meant to have explanatory force: that is, it seems that according to Aristotle, to grasp that A hypothetically necessitates B is to understand, at least in part, why B is the case. The trouble is that while Aristotle and his commentators do indeed seem to think that his appeals to hypothetical necessity are supposed to have explanatory power, their various glosses on the notion make it difficult to see how this could be the case. That is, he and his commentators seem, contrary to their intentions, to present appeals to hypothetical necessity as exemplifying patterns of inference that do not, in fact, have explanatory power. The challenge, then, is to provide an understanding of hypothetical necessity that allows us say how the patterns of inference invoking it are successful as explanations, and to distinguish them from patterns of inference that are not. I suggest that if we look in closer detail at the patterns of explanation Aristotle associates with hypothetical necessity, and the ways in which these are supposed to be distinctive, we can offer an account of what hypothetical necessity is and how it can have explanatory power. (shrink)

Aristotle presents four causes in Posterior Analytics 2.11, but where we expect matter we find instead the confusing formula, ‘what things being the case, necessarily this is the case’, and an equally confusing example. Some commentators infer that Aristotle is not referring to matter, others that he is but in a non-standard way. I argue that APo. 94a20-34 presents not matter, but determination by general features or facts, including facts about something’s genus. The closest connection to matter is Aristotle’s view (...) that the relation between genus and species is analogous to that between matter and a hylomorphic compound. (shrink)

Neal’s latest book uses Howard Thurman as a window through which to view concepts that shaped black thought in the Modern Era of the African-American Freedom Struggle. Thurman’s grasp of black culture and religious ideas during the period of enslavement allowed him to produce a body of work grounded in the musings and traditions of his ancestors.

A central thesis of the book is that we can assume "the worst" about what science tells us about the human animal without having to sacrifice any of the things that are of most importance to ethics: virtue and the good life, harmony of the ...

The International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF), designed by the WHO, attempts to provide a holistic model of functioning and disability by integrating a medical model with a social one. The aim of this article is to analyze the ICF’s claim to holism. The following components of the ICF’s complexity are analyzed: (1) health condition, (2) body functions and structures, (3) activity, (4) participation, (5) environmental factors, (6) personal factors, and (7) health. Although the ICF claims to be (...) holistic, it presupposes a monistic materialistic ontology. We indicate some limitations of this ontology, proposing instead: (a) a pluralistic–holistic ontology (PHO) and (b) a multidimensional view of the human being, with individual and environmental aspects, in relation to three levels of reality implied by the PHO. For the ICF to attain its holistic claim, the interactions between its components should be based on (a) and (b). (shrink)

Central to Aristotle's metaphysics and epistemology is the claim that ‘aitia’ – ‘cause’ – is “said in many ways”, i.e., multivocal. Though the importance of the four causes in Aristotle's system cannot be overstated, the nature of his pluralism about aitiai has not been addressed. It is not at all obvious how these modes of causation are related to one another, or why they all deserve a common term. Nor is it clear, in particular, whether the causes are related to (...) one another as species under a single genus, such that there is a univocal definition of ‘aitia’ which applies to all of them, or whether Aristotle means to assert that the four causes are homonyms. It is argued here that although there are strong reasons to group the four causes together, there are also powerful considerations on the side of homonymy. It is further argued that the four causes are more closely tied to the ontological theory of categories and predication than is often recognized. As a result, we can reconcile the competing demands of unity and plurality by taking one mode of causation, the formal cause, as basic, and accounting for the other modes with reference to it, in the manner of so-called pros hen homonyms. (shrink)

We describe an approach to textual inference that improves alignments at both the typed dependency level and at a deeper semantic level. We present a machine learning approach to alignment scoring, a stochastic search procedure, and a new tool that finds deeper semantic alignments, allowing rapid development of semantic features over the aligned graphs. Further, we describe a complementary semantic component based on natural logic, which shows an added gain of 3.13% accuracy on the RTE3 test set.

Working in a fixed Grothendieck topos Sh(C, J C ) we generalize \({\mathcal{L}_{{\infty},\omega}}\) to allow our languages and formulas to make explicit reference to Sh(C, J C ). We likewise generalize the notion of model. We then show how to encode these generalized structures by models of a related sentence of \({\mathcal{L}_{{\infty},\omega}}\) in the category of sets and functions. Using this encoding we prove analogs of several results concerning \({\mathcal{L}_{{\infty},\omega}}\) , such as the downward Löwenheim–Skolem theorem, the completeness theorem and (...) Barwise compactness. (shrink)

Cet article cherche à montrer qu’en comprenant la protention comme fonctionnant comme la rétention mais en sens inverse, on ne rend pas correctement compte de la conscience interne du temps. L’auteur commence par explorer plus largement la place de la rétention dans la théorie husserlienne de la conscience interne du temps, puis par montrer qu’on ne peut faire l’expérience phénoménologique de la protention de cette manière. A travers une analyse approfondie du concept de remplissement, l’article montre ensuite comment au cœur (...) de l’analyse husserlienne de la conscience interne du temps, en fait même au cœur de son analyse de la rétention, nous voyons la protention fonctionner d’une façon unique et distinctive. En dégageant dans l’analyse du remplissement de Husserl l’importance de la directionalité inhérente de la protention et sa capacité à distinguer entre les modes clarifiant et confirmant de l’intuition, l’avant-dernière section de cet article montre une fois pour toutes ce qui distingue la protention de la rétention. La différence n’est pas simplement une différence de direction, mais aussi de fonction essentielle. Enfin, l’auteur avance pour terminer qu’en échouant à reconnaître le rôle unique de la protention, on prend le risque non seulement de comprendre incorrectement la protention, mais aussi de rendre compte de la rétention elle-même de manière erronée, qui empêche d’apprécier avec exactitude ce qui est innovant dans l’analyse husserlienne de la conscience interne du temps. (shrink)

According to pancomputationalism, all physical systems – atoms, rocks, hurricanes, and toasters – perform computations. Pancomputationalism seems to be increasingly popular among some philosophers and physicists. In this paper, we interpret pancomputationalism in terms of computational descriptions of varying strength—computational interpretations of physical microstates and dynamics that vary in their restrictiveness. We distinguish several types of pancomputationalism and identify essential features of the computational descriptions required to support them. By tying various pancomputationalist theses directly to notions of what counts as (...) computation in a physical system, we clarify the meaning, strength, and plausibility of pancomputationalist claims. We show that the force of these claims is diminished when weaknesses in their supporting computational descriptions are laid bare. Specifically, once computation is meaningfully distinguished from ordinary dynamics, the most sensational pancomputationalist claims are unwarranted, whereas the more modest claims offer little more than recognition of causal similarities between physical processes and the most primitive computing processes. (shrink)

George Eliot strikingly describes one of her characters as making a mistake because he has gotten his thoughts “entangled in metaphors,” saying that we all do the same. I argue that Eliot is here giving us more than an illuminating description, but drawing our attention to a distinctive kind of mistake—a form of irrationality, in fact—of which metaphor can be an ineliminable part of the correct explanation. Her fictional case helps illuminate both a neglected function of the imagination, and a (...) pervasive way in which metaphor can affect it. The function is the creation and maintenance of what I call imaginative expectations, which are relatively stable imaginative representations of future events or experiences, analogous to latent memories. These imaginative expectations have a distinctive causal profile and distinct ways of interacting with other mental activities. I argue that their formation is subject to at least two norms—a “source” norm and an “experience” norm—and show how metaphorical framing can give rise to violations of either. (shrink)

How can imitation lead to free musical expression? This article explores the role of auditory imitation in jazz. Even though many renowned jazz musicians have assessed the method of imitating recorded music, no systematic study has hitherto explored how the method prepares for aural jazz improvisation. The article picks up an assumption presented by Berliner (1994), suggesting that learning jazz by aural imitation is “just like” learning a mother tongue. The article studies three potential stages in the method, comparing with (...) imitative, rhythmic, multimodal, and protosymbolic behavior of infant perception (building on the works of Stern, Trevarthen, and Merleau-Ponty). The demonstrations of the aural-imitation method draw on pedagogic experiences accumulated since 1979 in the Jazz Program at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. By analyzing structures of behavior suggested by the method, the article indicates key traits that render aural jazz improvisation possible, such as a fundamental sense of rhythm, formation of symbolic behavior, joint musical attention, and the facility to “hear via the other.” In conclusion, we critically address a frequent theoretical model describing musical improvisation as a synthesis of discrete elements or building blocks. (shrink)

What does it mean to enact a jazz beat as a creative performer? This article offers a critical reading of Iyer’s much-cited theory on rhythmic enaction. We locate the sonic environment approach in Iyer’s theory, and criticize him for advancing a one-to-one relationship between everyday perception and full-fledged aural competence of jazz musicians, and for comparing the latter with non-symbolic behaviour of non-human organisms. As an alternative, we suggest a Merleau-Ponty-inspired concept of rhythmic enaction, which we call the enactive communicative (...) approach. Key to this approach is the fact that jazz musicians play by ear, and that the beat emerges because of reciprocal, real-time aural communication. From this perspective, we outline the temporality of a jazz beat as a holistic and dialectical temporal structure. Throughout the discussions, we use John Coltrane’s ‘Trane’s Slo Blues’ as a point of reference. (shrink)

All too often, the requirements for actionability and accountability of data infrastructures are conceptualised as incompatible and leading to a trade-off situation where increasing one will unavoidably decrease the other. Through a comparative analysis of two data infrastructures used to share genomic data about the SARS-COV-2 virus, we argue that making data actionable for knowledge development involves a commitment to ensuring that the data in question are representative of the phenomena being studied and accountable to data subjects and users. This (...) in turn presupposes that: (1) enough data are contributed by a wide and diverse set of relevant sources; (2) mechanisms of feedback and inclusion are set up to ensure that data contributors can participate data governance and interpretation, thereby helping to adequately contextualise data; and (3) accountability extends to the ways in which data infrastructures are run, financed and positioned vis-à-vis the communities they are meant to serve. Such a model of data sharing can only work on the understanding that data do not need to be easily accessible to be actionable; rather, actionability depends on the responsiveness and accountability of data infrastructures, and the efforts invested in ensuring open communication among contributors. (shrink)

Depuis plusieurs décennies, s’est instaurée « une nouvelle ère » pour le corps, caractérisée par une évolution des pratiques médicales, mais aussi et surtout par le développement de nouvelles utopies. Face aux envahissantes mythologies et agitations idéologiques, l’objectif de cet article est donc de tenter de définir la réalité du « surhomme » d’aujourd’hui et d’analyser quelques-uns des mécanismes idéologiques qui participent à la fabrication de ce mythe.

Though not often discussed as such, Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge is a work of queer utopianism. Myra herself is an entrancing figure—a self-created goddess who is determined to save humanity by abolishing gender itself. That her efforts ultimately fail is a testament to the queerness of her utopianism. Using Lee Edelman's discussion of “reproductive futurism” and José Esteban Muñoz's insights into the queerness of utopianism, this article analyzes the ways in which Myra Breckinridge channels both hopeful and destructive urges as (...) a way of imagining a counter-narrative to the human catastrophe represented by the atomic bomb and the threat of overpopulation. (shrink)

The Guest Editorial On Wolverines and Epistemological Totalitarianism by Etzel Cardeña (JSE 24(3), Fall 2011) is little more than a rant, in which invective, ridicule, and mockery take the place of reasoned argumentation. Mind you, there’s nothing wrong with a good rant, especially when one agrees with the overall perspective, and I actually found myself in agreement with much of what the author had to say. Most of Cardeña’s anger is directed at those Materialist philosophers and psychologists who happily pontificate (...) against the possibility of psi while remaining studiously ignorant of the data that parapsychological research has uncovered. I think everyone who comes to parapsychology with an open mind at some point experiences the same frustration that Cardeña expresses toward Materialist idealogues, whose conclusions and opinions have been formed a priori and appear to be impervious to empirical data. But he seems equally upset with those who are “pro-psi,” lamenting "the epistemological absolutism that pervades both the strident anti-psi and pro-psi proponents from what I consider a healthy abeyance from fully committing to a closed position in science or in other aspects of life." (Cardeña, p. 539). (shrink)

Sartre analyse l’imagination dans le contexte d’une radicalisation de l’intentionnalité husserlienne. Alors que Husserl opérait avec un concept de constitution qui explicitait le statut de la transcendance à partir de l’immanence, la phénoménologie sartrienne semblerait faire l’économie de la notion de constitution. Mais ce point est plus délicat qu’il n’y paraît. Sartre rencontre plusieurs types de transcendances problématiques : celle de l’Ego (en 1936), de certaines images (1940), et celle du « soi » (1943). Cette étude vise à montrer comment (...) ces transcendances amènent à un remaniement implicite : il existerait un concept de constitution opératoire chez Sartre qui se passe de toute référence à l’immanence. Au moyen de l’imagination, nous proposons de clarifier le lexique sartrien : unité, identité et individualité sont des termes impliqués dans une analyse de la constitution. On montrera en quoi la « constitution sartrienne » met en évidence une dimension transcendantale de la phénoménologie de Sartre qui permet d’apprécier à nouveaux frais l’enjeu et les limites de ses prétentions ontologiques. (shrink)

_GPs serve in a double role of treatment provider and expert in certain social insurance systems, such as the Norwegian one. Some physicians assert that the ethical obligations of the two roles conflict with each other. The objective of this article is to show that social insurance medical ethics, which are based on recognised principles of medical ethics, unite the physicians’ obligations associated with these roles. The method applied is a medical ethics conceptual analysis. The material consists of literature on (...) normative SIME. The study shows that SIME expands the role of the treatment provider to a wider societal context. Here, physicians should attempt to balance the perspectives of sympathy with empathy, as treatment providers, with the impartiality in their role as experts. Five principles of medical ethics are fundamental. Respect for human dignity is the overarching principle of medical ethics. The four others are nonmaleficence, beneficence, autonomy, and social justice. The article discusses two areas where it is asserted that the roles of treatment provider and expert conflict with each other: the application of beneficence and justice, and the duty of confidentiality versus the duty to provide information to the National Insurance service. The study concludes that there are no basic ethical conflicts between the two roles. The ethical problems that may arise when exercising this duality should be viewed in the same way as other ethical problems in medicine. Actual application and balancing of the principles may necessitate negotiations between patients and physicians. _ _Keywords_: dual roles, professionalism, deliberation, impartiality, medical principle ethics, values of welfare state. (shrink)

An uneasy alliance.--The impact of technology.--Facts and reason in a nuclear age.--Through the crystal ball.--Priorities and secrecy in science.--Liberty in the age of science.--The social function of science.

Aristotle thinks that we understand something when we know its causes. According to Aristotle but contrary to most recent approaches, causation and explanation cannot be understood separately. Aristotle complicates matters by claiming that there are four causes, which have come to be known as the formal, material, final, and efficient causes. To understand Aristotelian causation and its relationship to explanation, then, we must come to a precise understanding of the four causes, and how they are supposed to be explanatory. Aristotle’s (...) discussion of the causes, however, is compact, and he typically presents them without arguing for them. He thus leaves us with a number of questions, ranging from the highly specific to the highly general. One question in particular has captured the attention of scholars and philosophers over the last century, and it has had a strong influence on recent treatments of the four causes – namely, whether we are right to understand Aristotle as committed to a plurality of kinds of causation, or rather a plurality of kinds of explanation. Sometimes the question is raised as one of whether it would be more accurate to speak of the four ‘becauses’ rather than the four ‘causes’. This worry is highly general, and there are in fact several ways in which it might be formulated; nonetheless, it is important to clarify the precise nature of the problem, and the possible ways of responding to it. At issue is not just whether Aristotle’s notions are sufficiently like the modern notion of causation to be relevant to our concerns, but, more importantly, whether the distinctions he draws are ultimately metaphysical or epistemological in character. (shrink)

This book aims to answer two main questions about Aristotle’s theory of causality and causal explanation, especially in relation to natural science: (1) How does he answer the main philosophical questions about causes to which he thinks his predecessors’ answers are flawed? (2) How do his answers bear on the main questions we confront in thinking about causality in general? The texts that deal with causality directly are analyzed against the background of his criticisms of his predecessors and his broader (...) views about explanation, highlighting their theoretically important commitments. This allows us to reveal the conceptual architecture of his theory. The basic theory is then applied to two questions about causality, one metaphysical and one epistemological. The metaphysical question is how to account for the relation between causes and what they cause, in light of a fundamental tension between different desiderata for causal explanations. Aristotle’s answer is pluralistic: he does not think that there is one metaphysical relationship between causes and what they cause even within a given mode of causality. The epistemological question asks how we grasp causes, and grasp them in a way that yields scientific understanding. Aristotle’s answer is again a pluralist one: metaphysically different phenomena demand different cognitive resources, and some are more accessible than others. Nevertheless, there is a discernible path from simpler to more sophisticated types of cognitive grasp on causality, in such a way that Aristotle can plausibly satisfy the epistemological constraints he thinks his predecessors cannot. Aristotle thus aims to provide a non-reductionist account of causality that still leaves room for a substantive conception of understanding in natural science. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:arrêt sur visagefrom Hatred of Translation1Nathanaël (bio)or else isolated in silence—Danielle Collobert, Ça des motsIn the language of film there are often extraordinary divergences between English and French, which prove at times to be irreconcilable.2 If this tendency toward discrepancy is true of translation as a rule, it reveals itself to be particularly true in the case of this work in translation. Danielle Collobert's Recherche,3 rendered as Research, in (...) which the search of re-search must be read as detachable, with emphasis on its repetitive motion—but also in its slide from substantive to predicate (search>searches)—makes salient such divergences, through the implied camera movement panning over the evacuated faces of A and B and the marked distances especially that define the space of their bodies, in proximity and in remove, as though the text were annotating a form of recusal that is implicit in the spaces of desire to which their mortiferous movements owe everything; an intimacy of anticipated death, and seizure, from which the camera extracts movements of degradation through violent stillness.Indeed the term still here is adopted to render the French arrêt, proposing a false equivalency between the (film) still and its seemingly concordant locution, the arrêt (sur image). These are "attested" terms that reveal something of the contexts in which each seeks to function. In Recherche Collobert limits herself [End Page 138] to the use of arrêt sur, designating in each instance a specific detail on which the camera is to stop. "Stop" of course is one of the translations of the lone substantive "arrêt," which also implies "arrest" (from the verb arrêter), replete with its juridical (enforceable/enforcible) intent.4One might just as readily translate "arrêt sur" as "stop at," stopping at nothing to achieve the irresistible demands of such a transitive language that subverts its own objectivity through a persistent preference for passive forms, abdicating one's responsibility to the law in abject deference to its capital aims. Regimens of grammar are coincident with regimens of power now as always.5More than one frontier has now been crossed, and reading the three works6 gathered by Françoise Morvan under the title Expériences (experiments and/ or experiences) in this so-called America is a serious transposition indeed in which the sands of north-western France adjoining the virulent Atlantic, may readily allow themselves to be supplanted by an imagined far-ouest of burnt deserts shimmering with radioactive particulate, under some gun. These are voided investigations that succeed only in subtracting the body from its criminality—a condemnation of ages pressed into moments, a crime committed to each and every one.Meurtre (Murder), the title of Collobert's first acknowledged work,7 is just as operative in these cinematic and radiophonic works; indeed, it can be read as a mot d'ordre for her entire oeuvre,8 and with which its entire topography is suffused. The stills of Recherche and "Polyphonie" attest to this, as does the recurrence of the isolate arrêt, whether in its designation of a bus stop or a pause in action (breaks in the fight, for example, between B and the man on the dock), toppling into the near untranslatable arrêts in the plural, stops, which invites, again, a transitive reading rather than the congealment of the plural substantive, and this, in keeping with the stares that transfix and bore into the faces verging on the dunes. The polysemic displacement of arrêt is such that the cumulative effect of its multiply transposed sense is that of a filmstrip caught in a projector, and it isn't clear whether the image is held or whether it is caught in the mechanism; in either case, the reader is among those held captive by a language that forbids release, burrowing instead, more deeply, into a thickeningly menacing interiority with its inscription of fear similar to that elicited by the perceived approach of the beast in Kafka's "The Burrow." The time of exposure holds the permanent promise of such a threat. [End Page 139]Nathanaël Nathanaël... (shrink)

Aristotle opens his discussion of time in Physics 4.10-14 with a puzzle, an argument which purports to show that time does not exist, since its only parts – the past and future – do not exist. He does not discuss the puzzle again, and so we are left with the question of how he would or could solve it. A full solution would involve not only a justification of realism about time, but also an account of why the puzzle arises, (...) what must be corrected to prevent it from arising, and how much of our pre-theoretical picture of time survives these adjustments. This paper argues that we can provide such a solution by (i) distinguishing between two ways of being committed to the reality of past, present, and future, and (ii) examining Aristotle’s remarks in Physics 4.12 on the notions of being in time and being surrounded by time. (shrink)

It is a commonplace that imagination is heterogeneous: we need to draw a series of cross-cutting distinctions even to begin any serious general discussion of the range of activities we take to be typical instances. The nature of the heterogeneity being exhibited is usually left unclear, however, and thus so are its consequences both for our understanding of imagination and for assessing certain challenges such as reductionism. Here it is argued that we can accept heterogeneity while recognizing important forms of (...) unity among the various kinds of imaginative activity. Four distinct but compatible strategies are considered, three of which have historical precedents in Aristotle’s and Hegel’s work. These proposals yield an interesting and plausible answer to the problem raised by heterogeneity, and have consequences for how we should respond to it. They share a plausible framework for thinking about the relationships among the various activities contemporary thinkers take to involve imagination. However, there are some ways in which deploying them is not straightforward, given some differences between modern approaches and older ones, and they conflict with a common thought about the epistemic status of imagination. (shrink)

This chapter aims to deepen Donald Schön’s insight about jazz playing as an example of what he calls “reflection-in-action” (RiA) by situating this notion within the enactive view of humans as linguistic bodies. Our main claim is that the knowl-edge or skills displayed by expert jazz musicians must be understood as aural and communicative in nature. After presenting the notions of RiA and linguistic bodies, we develop our view through a critical discussion of four statements from Schön’s passage on jazz (...) musicianship, before wrapping up and clarifying the position we are advocating. This way, we suggest a revised version of Schön’s concept, which we call “reflection in communicative jazz action.". (shrink)

The dialogue focuses on the major issues of the contemporary theoretical debate on judicial review and the Supreme Court's role in American constitutional democracy. The discussion begins with the US Supreme Court's case Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, successfully argued by Prof. Katyal last year, and covers important issues such as the separation and balance of powers after 9/11, the legitimacy of the laws of terror, the relation between US constitutional law and foreign law, the counter‐majoritarian difficulties posed by the exercise of (...) judicial review, and the legal academy's influence on legal practice. (shrink)

In this study, we test the interactive effect on ethical decision-making of (1) personal characteristics, and (2) personal expectanciesbased on perceptions of organizational rewards and punishments. Personal characteristics studied were cognitive moral developmentand belief in a just world. Using an in-basket simulation, we found that exposure to reward system information influenced managers’ outcome expectancies. Further, outcome expectancies and belief in a just world interacted with managers’ cognitive moral development to influence managers’ ethical decision-making. In particular, low-cognitive moral development managers who (...) expected that their organization condoned unethical behavior made less ethical decisions while high cognitive moral development managers became more ethical in this environment. Low cognitive moral development managers also behaved less ethically when their belief in a just world was high. (shrink)

The article defines a comprehensive concept of cognitive objectivity (CCCO) applied to embodied subjects in health care. The aims of this study were: (1) to specify some necessary conditions for the definition of a CCCO that will allow objective descriptions and assessments in health care, (2) to formulate criteria for application of such a CCCO, and (3) to investigate the usefulness of the criteria in work disability assessments in medical certificates from health care provided for social security purposes. The study (...) design was based on a philosophical conceptual analysis of objectivity and subjectivity, the phenomenological notions ‘embodied subject’, ‘life-world’, ‘phenomenological object’ and ‘empathy’, and an interpretation of certificates as texts. The study material consisted of 18 disability assessments from a total collection of 86 medical certificates provided for social security purposes, written in a Norwegian hospital-based mental health clinic. Four necessary conditions identified for defining a CCCO were: (A) acknowledging the patient’s social context and life-world, (B) perceiving patients as cognitive objects providing a variety of meaningful data (clinical, psychometric, and behavioural data – i.e. activities and actions, meaningful expressions and self-reflection), (C) interpreting data in context, and (D) using general epistemological principles. The criteria corresponding to these conditions were: (a) describing the patient’s social context and recognizing the patient’s perspective, (b) taking into consideration a variety of quantitative and qualitative data drawn from the clinician’s perceptions of the patient as embodied subject, (c) being aware of the need to interpret the data in context, and (d) applying epistemological principles (professional expertise, dialogical intersubjectivity, impartiality, accuracy and correctness). Genuine communication is presupposed. These criteria were tested in the work disability assessments of medical certificates. The criteria were useful for understanding both how objectivity fails during work disability assessments and how it can be improved in the writing of certificates. The article specifies four necessary conditions for the definition of a CCCO in health care and social security medicine and the corresponding criteria for its application. Analysis of the objectivity of work disability assessments in medical certificates for social security confirmed the usefulness of the criteria. (shrink)

When philosophers talk about descriptions, usually they have in mind singular definite descriptions such as ‘the finest Greek poet’ or ‘the positive square root of nine’, phrases formed with the definite article ‘the’. English also contains indefinite descriptions such as ‘a fine Greek poet’ or ‘a square root of nine’, phrases formed with the indefinite article ‘a’ (or ‘an’); and demonstrative descriptions (also known as complex demonstratives) such as ‘this Greek poet’ and ‘that tall woman’, formed with the demonstrative articles (...) ‘this’ and ‘that’. Following the custom in philosophy, in this chapter often we use ‘description’ as short for ‘definite description’; and following the custom in linguistics, often we use ‘definite’, ‘indefinite’, and ‘demonstrative’ as shorthand nouns. For the most part we focus on definite and indefinites, although a few words about demonstratives are called for. At the centre of debates about descriptions is the matter of whether they are devices of reference or of predication (simple or higher-order), and much discussion focuses on how various proposals are to be incorporated into broader theories of the semantics of natural language. But philosophical interest goes beyond the confines of linguistics, logic, and the philosophy of language because choices made about the semantics of descriptions have repercussions elsewhere, particularly in epistemology and metaphysics. A simple match of form and meaning appears to fail.1 First, many occurrences of expressions of both forms ‘the φ’ and ‘a φ’ appear to be used to talk about particular individuals. Consider (1). (shrink)

"Culverwell's Discourse of the Light of Nature, composed in a period of religious and political unheaval, and delivered as lectures to Cambridge students in 1646, is an imaginative statement of the teachings of Christian humanism concerning the nature and limits of human reason and the related concepts of natural and divine law. Culverwell has much in common with the Cambridge Platonists, sharing with them a spiritual home at Emmanuel College; yet his thought is grounded in the scholasticism of Aquinas and (...) Suarez, and it is within this context that he explores the rich potential of the biblical metaphor from Proverbs which is his central text: 'The understanding of a man is the Candle of the Lord.' Heeding Bacon's call for an appraisal of the rôle of reason in religious matters, and drawing on the ideas of Grotius and Selden concerning natural law, Culverwell offers a critique of reason that attempts to preserve the attitudes of Calvinism and yet reveals a strong tendency to credit reason with more authority than that tradition allows. faith and reason, nature and grace, revealed truth and common notions, the priority of divine will or divine reason—these inherited dilemmas are examined with insight and flashes of poetic brilliance. The pattern that emerges reveals a suggestive parallel with Milton's intellectual development in the same period, illuminates the Whichcote-Tuckney controversy of 1651, and probably provided John Locke with an intellectual stimulus for his early Essays on the Law of Nature. Alter to the currents of his day (the Discourse, for example, is one of the first English writings to refer to Descartes), Culverwell offers an interesting approach to schools of thought in mid-century England, while his treatment of such stock themes of renaissance philosophy as Epicureanism, Stoicism, Skepticism, innate ideas, and the nature of the soul, shows the mental and rhetorical habits of the seventeenth-century Cambridge scholar. His significance as a thinker, however, lies in his ability to draw the varied elements of his study, ancient and modern, into an individual synthesis which has a distinctive form and style. The text has been carefully and faithfully transcribed by the editors, and translations of the Greek and Hebrew passages are supplied in square brackets. In a lengthy, explanatory introduction, the editors discuss the part played by the Discourse in the controversies of the day and the thinkers from whom Culverwell drew his material, thus shedding light on the evolution of English rationalism in the seventeenth century. Full documentation is supplied in the form of notes following the text, plus a section of textual notes listing all departures in this edition from the first edition of 1652. The annotation also established for the first time ull range of Culverwell's sources—classical, mediaeval, and renaissance—and enables the reader to appreciate his manner of citing authority and handling illustration. The Discourse makes fascinating reading. It will appeal especially to students of seventeenth-century theology, English, philosophy, and history; and it provides a background against which Locke's thought may be understood."-Publisher. (shrink)