Critical analysis of the commercialization and malpractice current in the profession of medicine.

But still I think some account has to be given of the application of CM to tides and cannon balls etc. etc. It seems to me that Einstein's and Bohr's analysis was essentially correct: we make the connection, and thus apply the mathematical statements of CM to macroscopic features of the world about us, by constructing, within the mathematical framework,. macroscopic conglomerates of the elementary particles and fields that should have the general appearance of tides and billiard, looked at from (...) a distance, and that would respond to the probings of mathematical models of measuring devices, whose "pointers" we can see from afar, in the ways that waves and billiard balls do. I think a look at how CM has been used and applied since the time of Newton and Galileo shows that the mathematical theory is linked into our experiences of the world in this nonproblematic way, and that this correspondence at this nonproblematic level is part of classical mechanics in the broad sense in which it is understood by people who use it. (shrink)

Kenneth Inada calls this last book in Nolan Pliny Jacobson’s trilogy on Buddhist philosophy and process thought "not only timely, but urgent." "The message contained in the book," he notes, "should be released immediately." Seizo Ohe, Japan’s most distinguished philosopher of science, captures the essence of that message when he cites Jacobson’s understanding that Buddhism is "a new global cultural movement in which Japan and America are going to have a common world-historical mission—respectively as the eastern and western ends (...) of the eastern and western branches of human civilization." Jacobson convincingly demonstrates that Buddhism and the Western philosophies of Heraclitus and of modern thinkers such as Dewey, Whitehead, and Hartshorne have developed a reason truer to authentic experience than the reason so prevalent in traditionally dominant Western philosophy. (shrink)

Nearly all studies of consumers’ willingness to engage in ethical or socially responsible purchasing behavior is based on unconstrained survey response methods. In the present article we ask the question of how well does asking consumers the extent to which they care about a specific social or ethical issue relate to how they would behave in a more constrained environment where there is no socially acceptable response. The results of a comparison between traditional survey questions of “intention to purchase” and (...) estimates of individuals willingness-to-pay for social attributes in products reveal that simple survey questions are too “noisy” to provide operationally meaningful information and overstate intentions to a considerable extent. (shrink)

Bob Hale in Hale 1995b posed a dilemma for modal fictionalism (more specifically, Rosen's version of modal fictionalism). A modal fictionalist who maintains the version outlined in Rosen 1990 believes that the fiction of possible worlds (PW, to use Rosen and Hale's abbreviation) is not literally true. The question arises, however, about its modal status. Is it necessarily false, or contingently false? In either case, Hale argues, the modal fictionalist is in trouble. Should the modal fictionalist claim that the story (...) of possible worlds is necessarily false, then the modal fictionalist cannot gloss their "according to the fiction of possible worlds ... ." prefix as "were the fiction of possible worlds true, then ... would be true". This is because, according to Hale, conditional claims with antecedents which are necessarily false are automatically true, so it follows that if the fiction of possible worlds is taken to be necessarily false, all conditionals of the form "were the fiction of possible worlds true then ..." are true, and not merely the ones that the modal fictionalist wishes to endorse. If the modal fiction is to be useful, not everything should be true according to it: examples of claims that had better not be true according to it include the claim that 2+2=7, or the claim that there are no possible worlds. On the other hand, if the fiction of possible worlds (PW) is only contingently false, Hale claims this also lands the Rosen's fictionalism in unacceptable trouble, though it is not so clear why (see below). Let me discuss these horns in turn. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Christ's Human Nature and the Cry from the Cross:St. Thomas Aquinas on Psalm 22:2Philip Nolan O.P.Christ's cry from the Cross quoting Psalm 22 (Mark 15:34; Matt 27:46) has become a central focus for contemporary Christological debates.1 A number of modern thinkers have read this verse as expressing in Christ an experience of dereliction incompatible with traditional positions concerning divine impassibility Christ's beatific knowledge, and Trinitarian relations.2 Thomas Joseph (...) White has recently offered an insightful Thomistic critique of these interpretations: [End Page 1219]The final cry of Christ on the cross cannot be interpreted as a cry of either despair or of spiritual separation from God. By contrast, it must be understood theologically as a prayer of desire related to Christ's abandonment to the Father and his hope to introduce humanity into the eschatological gift of redemption.3In his work, White is concerned to engage with modern Christological themes using principles derived from the Thomistic tradition. For this reason, he articulates a rather original alternative to modern theologies of dereliction—especially those marked by divine kenoticism and Luther's theology of the Cross. In offering a view inspired by Thomistic principles, White presents his own creative retrieval of Aquinas's ideas concerning the cry from the Cross.At times, however, White's argument leaves somewhat obscure the literal meaning of the words of that cry: "My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?"4 For example, in pushing back against radical interpretations [End Page 1220] of dereliction, he shifts the language of "abandonment" from God's abandonment of Christ to Christ's abandonment to the Father. My argument in this article is that the textual commentaries on Psalm 225 by Augustine and Aquinas—material that White does not consider specifically—can provide an alternate and somewhat complementary Thomistic approach to the one White proposes, and one more soundly based on Aquinas's texts themselves.6 Christ's cry is a quote from this psalm, and Aquinas's commentary on Ps 22:27 develops the Augustinian interpretation of this verse in order to give greater emphasis to Christ's human nature. This emphasis helps to explain, in a classical way, what it can mean that Christ is abandoned. Thus, Aquinas's exegesis bolsters the orthodox response to contemporary revisionist theologians by providing a clear literal understanding of this contested biblical passage without applying an experience of damnation to Christ or denying classical positions concerning divine impassibility, Christ's beatific knowledge, and the nature of Trinitarian relations.To make this argument, I will first look at the rich tradition of reflection on the Christological meaning of the Psalms, and Psalm 22 in particular, inherited by Thomas. This tradition includes a series of psalm commentaries, conciliar documents, and a variety of other theological works. In this tradition, I argue, we see two primary interpretative approaches. The first is what I will call the Augustinian approach, which insists that Christ is speaking on the Cross for sinners and in the voice of sinners. The second interpretation places more weight on Christ's own voice and insists that he is speaking in a real way for himself—Christ in some way truly is abandoned by God. These interpretations need not and should not be read as contradictory. In fact, all the authorities I examine insist on the first approach. Differences emerge, however, in how they coordinate the latter interpretation with the former. I will discuss Thomas's synthesis of these interpretations, a synthesis that he grounds in the reality of Christ's human nature. Finally, I will suggest [End Page 1221] how a close reading of Thomas's mature treatment of Ps 22:2 supplements contemporary Thomist responses to modern Christological concerns and misguided interpretations of Christ's cry on the Cross.Thomas's Sources for Reading Psalm 22:2Thomas's primary source for understanding Ps 22:2 is Scripture itself Both Mark and Matthew report that Christ spoke the words of this psalm from the Cross, a fact which necessitates for Thomas a Christological interpretation of the psalm.8 Augustine links Ps 22:2 with passages in... (shrink)

Routledge Encyclopedia entry on Intensionality and Hyperintensionality.

The Architecture Machine: Industrial Design and Theories of Racial Evolution -- The Bauhaus and the Aura of Authorship: Class and Race in the Age of Technological Reproducibility -- Post-War European Modernism: Or, What the Primitive Hut Really Said -- Bricolage, Megastructure, Interface: Yona Friedman and the Humanitarian Machine -- The Earth Unfolded: Aspen, Africa, and the Geopolitics of Environment -- Harlem Speaks to Aspen: Environmental Politics versus Environmental Design -- Pentecostal Technologies: The Architecture Machine (Again) -- Technological Sovereignty and the (...) Global South -- Conclusion: The Present and Future of Spiritual Ergonomics. (shrink)

Pierre Bourdieu was one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. He argued for, and practiced, rigorous and reflexive scholarship, interrogating the inequities and injustices of modern societies. Through a lifetime's explication of the ways in which schooling both produces and reproduces the status quo, Bourdieu offered a powerful critique and method of analysis of the history of schooling, and of contemporary educational polices and trends. Though frequently used in educational research, Bourdieu's work has had much less take (...) up in Educational Leadership, Management and Administration. Educational Leadership and Pierre Bourdieuargues that ELMA scholars have much to gain by engaging more thoroughly with his work. The book explains each of the key terms in Bourdieu's thinking tool kit, showing how the tripartite concepts of field, habitus and capitals offer a way through which to understand the interaction of structure and agency, and the limits on the freedom of an individual - in this case an educational leader - to act. Educational Leadership and Pierre Bourdieuoffers an analysis of dominant trends in ELMA research, examining the kinds of questions asked, projects undertaken and methods used. It provides alternative questions and methods based on a Bourdieusian approach, further readings and a range of exemplars of the application of these tools. The book will be of interest to those whose primary focus is the utility of Bourdieu's social theory. (shrink)

It is almost universally believed that some infinite regresses are vicious, and also almost universally believed that some are benign. In this paper I argue that regresses can be vicious for several different sorts of reasons. Furthermore, I claim that some intuitively vicious regresses do not suffer from any of the particular aetiologies that guarantee viciousness to regresses, but are nevertheless so on the basis of considerations of parsimony. The difference between some apparently benign and some apparently vicious regresses, then, (...) turns out to be a matter of a more general assessment of costs and benefits, making viciousness of regresses in some cases less of a local matter than is usually thought. (shrink)

In May 1999, David Lewis sent Timothy Williamson an intriguing letter about knowledge and vagueness. This paper has a brief discussion of Lewis on evidence, and a longer discussion of a distinctive theory of vagueness Lewis puts forward in this letter, one rather different from standard forms of supervaluationism. Lewis's theory enables him to provide distinctive responses to the challenges to supervaluationism famously offered in chapter 5 of Timothy Williamson's 1994 book Vagueness. However these responses bring out a number of (...) very surprising features of Lewis's own view. -/- The letter from Lewis itself is available on the blog of The Age of Metaphysical Revolution Project, University of Manchester. (shrink)

A lot of good philosophy is done in the armchair, but is nevertheless a posteriori. This paper clarifies and then defends that claim. Among the a posteriori activities done in the armchair are assembling and evaluating commonplaces; formulating theoretical alternatives; and integrating well-known past a posteriori discoveries. The activity that receives the most discussion, however, is the application of theoretical virtues to choose philosophical theories: the paper argues that much of this is properly seen as a posteriori.

This paper argues that all of the standard theories about the divisions of space and time can benefit from, and may need to rely on, parsimony considerations. More specifically, whether spacetime is discrete, gunky or pointy, there are wildly unparsimonious rivals to standard accounts that need to be resisted by proponents of those accounts, and only parsimony considerations offer a natural way of doing that resisting. Furthermore, quantitative parsimony considerations appear to be needed in many of these cases.

How does human language contribute to the cognitive edge humans have over other species? This question eludes most current theories of language and knowledge. Incorporating research results in psychology and cutting a path through a broad range of philosophical debates, Nolan develops a strikingly original account of language acquisition which holds important implications for standard theories of language and the philosophical foundations of cognitive science.

Because psychiatry deals specifically with ‘mental’ suffering, its efforts are always centrally involved with the meaningful world of human reality. As such, it sits at the interface of a number of discourses: genetics and neuroscience, psychology and sociology, anthropology, philosophy, and the humanities. Each of these provides frameworks, concepts, and examples that seek to assist our attempts to understand mental distress and how it might be helped. However, these discourses work with different assumptions, methodologies, values, and priorities. Some are in (...) dispute with one another. At various times in the history of psychiatry, a particular form of understanding has become dominant and worked to marginalize .. (shrink)

Possible worlds have found many applications in contemporary philosophy: from theories of possibility and necessity, to accounts of conditionals, to theories of mental and linguistic content, to understanding supervenience relationships, to theories of properties and propositions, among many other applications. Almost as soon as possible worlds started to be used in formal theories in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and elsewhere, theorists started to wonder whether impossible worlds should be postulated as well. In many applications, possible worlds (...) face limitations that can be dealt with through postulating impossible worlds as well. This chapter examines some of the uses of impossible worlds, and philosophical challenges theories of impossible worlds face. (shrink)

Reasoning about situations we take to be impossible is useful for a variety of theoretical purposes. Furthermore, using a device of impossible worlds when reasoning about the impossible is useful in the same sorts of ways that the device of possible worlds is useful when reasoning about the possible. This paper discusses some of the uses of impossible worlds and argues that commitment to them can and should be had without great metaphysical or logical cost. The paper then provides an (...) account of reasoning with impossible worlds, by treating such reasoning as reasoning employing counterpossible conditionals, and provides a semantics for the proposed treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 35.1 (2002) 1-21 [Access article in PDF] Turning Kant Against the Priority of Autonomy: Communication Ethics and the Duty to Community Pat J. Gehrke Communication ethics scholars afford Immanuel Kant significantly less attention than one might expect. This may be because, as Robert Dostal notes, Kant argues that rhetoric merits no respect whatsoever (223). This rejection of rhetoric, Dostal writes, is grounded in the significant emphasis (...) given to Kant's concept of autonomy (232). The focus on autonomy and, hence, rhetoricians' relative neglect of Kant's ethical theory are both connected to the separation of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (hereinafter CPuR) from his subsequent ethical and moral philosophy. Kenneth Burke writes that Kant's first critique has no ethical implications, "no 'wills,' 'oughts,' 'shoulds,' or 'thou shalt nots'... nothing but an inevitable is, a description of conditions as they necessarily are for human experience" (191; emphasis in original). Such readings lose much of the richness and complexity of Kant's thought and tend instead to produce simple moral duties, such as Mike Markel's assertion that technical communicators must be truthful.Perhaps the most critical element of Kant's work lost in our focus on autonomy is his articulation of a ground for a duty to community. While Kant makes clear the importance of community for his metaphysics in the first critique (CPuR), the importance of community in Kant's moral philosophy often is overlooked. Some scholars claim that an ethical duty to community is either rejected by Kant's emphasis on the autonomy of will or simply ignored. This article combines a reading of Kant's metaphysics of experience with his moral philosophy to articulate a communication ethic grounded in community. This argument is made in three parts: first, the community of objects in experience—the Third Analogy of Experience—is an organizing principle of and a necessary condition for the possibility of all experience; second, this metaphysical principle of community is relevant [End Page 1] to community as developed in Kant's ethical writings; and finally, Kant's own work undermines the primacy of autonomy and better supports a communication ethic grounded in a duty to community.Scholars interested in Jurgen Habermas's theory of communicative action have special reason to take note of Kant's work. Kant is not only a figure that Habermas sees reflected in his own work, 1 but a constant point of contrast. Craig Calhoun writes that much of Habermas's own philosophy emerges by rejecting Kant's epistemology and elements of his metaphysics while still giving credence to Kantian moral philosophy (2). However, like most communication scholars and philosophers, Habermas believes that autonomy governs Kantian ethics: "Formalistic ethics (Kant) binds the criterion of generality of norms to the further criterion of autonomy, that is, independence from contingent motives" (Habermas, Legitimation 89). Since autonomy excludes or represses the contingent, if our readings of Kant give primacy to autonomy we leave little room for any notion of community as manifest in experience. In no small part, it is the criticism of Kant for privileging autonomy that has given Habermasians their break from Kantian ethics. However, if we turn to the first critique to guide our reading of the moral philosophy, there is another way to understand the role of autonomy and community in Kant's thought. By linking Kant's metaphysics with his moral philosophy, this article turns Kant away from the primacy of autonomy and uses Kant's own works to argue that autonomy is but one half of an antinomy that is organized under the principle of community. Thus, this article recuperates the possibility of deploying Kantian metaphysics and moral philosophy together as grounds for a communication ethic that privileges community and recovers the value of rhetoric.For rhetorical scholars, the resistance to the priority of autonomy may be related to the frequent expression of community through appeal to commonality, sameness, or identification. Today, feminist, race, postmodern, and poststructural communication scholars are questioning the value of commonality as a ground for ethics (e... (shrink)

There would seem to be a great deal of confusion and misunderstanding in the public mind about the life stance of modern humanism and its philosophical underpinnings. As a committed humanist Pat Duffy Hutcheon has made many invaluable contributions to the clarification of the nature and origin of evolutionary naturalism as a necessary component of modern humanism. This collection of topical essays is the most recent addition to her ongoing pursuit, following her analysis of cultural development in Building Character and (...) Culture (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1999) and her earlier seminal work tracing the evolution of the naturalistic basis of social-scientific thought in Leaving the Cave (Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1996). This, her newest book presents the ideas in the context of their time, of some of the most prominent thinkers who have, in one way or another, shaped the evolving philosophy of humanism over the centuries. It is a much needed and most welcome resource for any thoughtful person who wants to better appreciate the naturalistic view of human existence rather than the supernatural or mystical approaches that so regrettably dominate the current scene. (shrink)

Liberals agree that free speech should be protected, where speech is understood broadly to include all forms of intentional communication, including actions and pictures, not merely the spoken or written word. A surprising view about free speech in some liberal and legal circles is that communications should be protected on free-speech grounds only if the communications are mentally mediated. By “mentally mediated communication” we mean speech which communicates its message in such a way that the message can be rationally evaluated (...) by hearers, and causes the hearers to believe it, when it does, through the mechanism of those hearers employing their rational capacity to judge that it is correct. The mental-mediation or persuasion principle, as it is sometimes called, has some important legal and public policy implications. It has been applied to argue that certain forms of expression, despite being forms of speech or expression, lack even a prima facie claim to protection on free speech grounds. -/- Our central aim is to show why the mental mediation principle is mistaken. Liberals should think that some speech which is not mentally mediated deserves protection for the very same reasons that speech which is mentally mediated is often thought to deserve protection. (shrink)

Thought experiments are common where infinitely many entities acting in concert give rise to strange results. Some of these cases, however, can be generalized to yield almost omnipotent systems from limited materials. This paper discusses one of these cases, bringing out one aspect of what seems so troubling about "New Zeno" cases. -/- This paper is in memory of Josh Parsons.

This book is for postgraduate students working for research degrees in institutions of higher education wherever the language of instruction is English. Irrespective of field of study, it will make their work and life more productive, effective and enjoyable. The Research Student's Guide to Success: identifies the skills and strategies which make for success as a postgraduate research student; offers practical advice which can be readily adapted to meet individual needs; provides essential support for all research students; encourages research students (...) to take responsibility for their own progress; acknowledges both the hardships and the pleasures of being a research student; and builds confidence throughout. The book is easy to dip into and is written in conversational style. Interest and realism are added through anecdotes, extracts from literature and pithy quotations. The book will also be useful to undergraduate, diploma and taught masters students doing projects and dissertations. (shrink)

Harnad accepts the picture of computation as formalism, so that any implementation of a program - thats any implementation - is as good as any other; in fact, in considering claims about the properties of computations, the nature of the implementing system - the interpreter - is invisible. Let me refer to this idea as 'Computationalism'. Almost all the criticism, claimed refutation by Searle's argument, and sharp contrasting of this idea with others, rests on the absoluteness of this separation between (...) a computational system and its implementation. (shrink)

In this paper, I motivate the view that quantitative parsimony is a theoretical virtue: that is, we should be concerned not only to minimize the number of kinds of entities postulated by our theories (i. e. maximize qualitative parsimony), but we should also minimize the number of entities postulated which fall under those kinds. In order to motivate this view, I consider two cases from the history of science: the postulation of the neutrino and the proposal of Avogadro's hypothesis. I (...) also consider two issues concerning how a principle of quantitative parsimony should be framed. (shrink)

Creationism about fictional entities requires a principle connecting what fictions say exist with which fictional entities really exist. The most natural way of spelling out such a principle yields inconsistent verdicts about how many fictional entities are generated by certain inconsistent fictions. Avoiding inconsistency without compromising the attractions of creationism will not be easy.

Williamson proposes that a "suppositional procedure" is a central heuristic we use to evaluate the truth of conditionals, though he also argues that this method often leads us astray. An alternative approach to the link between supposition and conditionals is to claim that we are guided by our antecedent conditional judgements in our supposing, and in particular in our determining which things follow from an initial supposition. This alternative explanation of the close link between conditionals and supposition is developed and (...) compared to Williamson's proposal. (shrink)

In the last few decades of the twentieth century there was a revolution in metaphysics: the intensional revolution. Many metaphysicians rejected the doctrine, associated with Quine and Davidson, that extensional analyses and theoretical resources were the only acceptable ones. Metaphysicians embraced tools like modal and counterfactual analyses, claims of modal and counterfactual dependence, and entities such as possible worlds and intensionally individuated properties and relations. The twenty-first century is seeing a hypterintensional revolution. Theoretical tools in common use carve more finely (...) than by necessary equivalence: two pieces of language can apply to the same entities across all possible worlds but not be equivalent; thoughts can be necessarily equivalent in truth value but not synonymous. This paper argues that hyperintensional resources are valuable in metaphysics outside theories of representation, and discusses some promising areas of hyperintensional metaphysics. (shrink)

Pat White; Work-place Democracy and Political Education [1], Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 13, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 5–20, https://doi.org/10.

The importance of ethical consumerism to many companies worldwide has increased dramatically in recent years. Ethical consumerism encompasses the importance of non-traditional and social components of a company's products and business process to strategic success - such as environmental protectionism, child labor practices and so on. The present paper utilizes a random utility theoretic experimental design to provide estimates of the relative value selected consumers place on the social features of products.

Curry's paradox for "if.. then.." concerns the paradoxical features of sentences of the form "If this very sentence is true, then 2+2=5". Standard inference principles lead us to the conclusion that such conditionals have true consequents: so, for example, 2+2=5 after all. There has been a lot of technical work done on formal options for blocking Curry paradoxes while only compromising a little on the various central principles of logic and meaning that are under threat. -/- Once we have a (...) sense of the technical options, though, a philosophical choice remains. When dealing with puzzles in the logic of conditionals, a natural place to turn is independently motivated semantic theories of the behaviour of "if... then...". This paper argues that the closest-worlds approach outlined in Nolan 1997 offers a philosophically satisfying reason to deny conditional proof and so block the paradoxical Curry reasoning, and can give the verdict that standard Curry conditionals are false, along with related "contraction conditionals". (shrink)

Pat White, John White; David Cooper's Illusions, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 239–248, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1.

Abstract There are at least eight good reasons practicing historians should concern themselves with counterfactual claims. Furthermore, four of these reasons do not even require that we are able to tell which historical counterfactuals are true and which are false. This paper defends the claim that these reasons to be concerned with counterfactuals are good ones, and discusses how each can contribute to the practice of history. Content Type Journal Article Pages 1-19 DOI 10.1007/s11098-011-9817-z Authors Daniel Nolan, School of (...) Philosophy, Australian National University, 0200 Canberra, Australia Journal Philosophical Studies Online ISSN 1573-0883 Print ISSN 0031-8116. (shrink)

This paper explores a special kind of loop of grounding: cosmic loops. A cosmic loop is a loop that intuitively requires us to go "around" the entire universe to come back to the original ground. After describing several kinds of cosmic loop scenarios, I will discuss what we can learn from these scenarios about constraints on grounding; the conceivability of cosmic loops; the possibility of cosmic loops; and the prospects for salvaging local reflexivity, asymmetry and transitivity of grounding in a (...) world containing a cosmic loop of ground. The considerations raised in this paper also bear on what we should think about relations that are meant to support grounding relations: in particular, revisions to theories of the part-whole relation are discussed. (shrink)

Nolan, Ann MC In the past fifty years there has been a stream of commentary on the documents of Vatican II. Have we not had so much commentary, so much interpretation, that further commentary is unnecessary? Fifty years on, one might ponder how to interpret the sixteen documents for the church of our times, indeed to wonder whether they continue to have any relevance at all. Faced with this thought, we could turn to one scholar whose works span almost (...) the whole of this fifty-year period, yet whose thought in relation to the documents has not remained static: the renaissance historian John O'Malley SJ. (shrink)

We are very grateful to both Matthew Ratcliffe and Thomas Szasz for taking the time to read and respond to our paper. Ratcliffe is broadly sympathetic to our efforts and provides a very convincing argument against mind–body dualisms by drawing on work from the phenomenological tradition. His comments extend rather than challenge our central thesis. Szasz, however, is dismissive of our position. As a result, most of our response is directed to his commentary. Ratcliffe uses the work of van der (...) Berg to make the case that any easy distinction between bodily and mental illness or suffering is false to our lived reality as human beings. Of course, in the day-to- day world of contemporary medical practice .. (shrink)