We provide a justification for political liberalism’s Reciprocity Principle, which states that political decisions must be justified exclusively on the basis of considerations that all reasonable citizens can reasonably be expected to accept. The standard argument for the Reciprocity Principle grounds it in a requirement of respect for persons. We argue for a different, but compatible, justification: the Reciprocity Principle is justified because it makes possible a desirable kind of political community. The general endorsement of the Reciprocity Principle, we will (...) argue, helps realize joint political rule and relationships of civic friendship. The main obstacle to the realization of these values is the presence of reasonable disagreement about religious, moral, and philosophical issues characteristic of liberal societies. We show the Reciprocity Principle helps to overcome this obstacle. (shrink)

This is a new release of the original 1960 edition.

This paper uses the case of solo doctors to explore whether working in relative isolation from one’s peers may be detrimental to ethical decision-making. Drawing upon the relevance of communication and interaction for ethical decision-making in the ethical theories of Habermas, Mead and Gadamer, it is argued that doctors benefit from ethical discussion with their peers and that solo practice may make this more difficult. The paper identifies a paucity of empirical research related to solo practice and ethics but draws (...) upon more general medical ethics research and a study that identified ethical isolation among community pharmacists to support the theoretical claims made. The paper concludes by using the literary analogy of Soderberg’s Doctor Glas to illustrate the issues raised and how ethical decision-making in relative isolation may be problematical. (shrink)

In this chapter, Hankinson discusses Aristotle's conceptions of nature, change, and potentiality; the four causes, spontaneity, and chance; teleology and hypothetical necessity; and also Aristotle's account of action, freedom, and responsibility. The choice facing Greek philosopher‐scientists is simple: show how a structured, regular world could arise out of undirected processes, or pursue a teleological explanation, insisting on the activity of divine intelligence in the cosmos. Aristotle, Hankinson writes, pursues a middle way between these options, although, ultimately, Aristotle takes the whole (...) structure of the cosmos to be teleologically organized. Aristotle rejects Plato's metaphysics of perfect hypostasized forms and divinely directed teleology: relying heavily on his concept of phusis or nature, Aristotle makes teleology an internal principle governing the development of natural objects. Aristotle distinguishes four causes or causal factors in explanation: matter, form, agent, and end, and he distinguishes sharply between regular natural events that can be explained by means of these causes, and chance events, which do not admit full explanation. (shrink)

In this chapter, Hankinson considers the treatment of causation and explanation in two important strands of Ancient Greek thought: rational medicine and the sophistic movement. The Hippocratic treatises of the fifth century bc represent a movement in Greek medical practice away from traditional types of explanation of disease in favour of a naturalistic, physiological model of human pathology, which leads to the emergence of the allopathic causal principle, ‘opposites cure opposites’. The Hippocratic treatises distinguished internal, constitutional factors from external causes, (...) a distinction that helps towards explaining why some people are affected by a disease, or benefited from a cure, while others are not. Drawing upon Antiphon and Gorgias, Hankinson also discusses the sophist contribution to causation and explanation, in particular their emphasis on responsibility in the explanation of action. Finally, Hankinson highlights a tendency, evident in Herodotus’ History and also in the medical treatise Airs, Waters, Places, to explain general traits of physique and character in terms of ethnography, i.e. on the basis of environment, climate, and lifestyle. (shrink)

In this chapter, Hankinson discusses the origins of syncretism, or the growing convergence of Platonism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism, focusing mainly on the Old Academy Platonists Speusippus and Xenocrates, the empiricist Stoic Posidonius, the lapsed sceptic Antiochus, and the orthodox Aristotelian Alexander of Aphrodisias. Hankinson also discusses Eudorus, Philo of Larissa, and Plutarch, as well as briefly noting the influential Primer on Plato's Doctrines by Alcinous. The importance of the Old Academy is its influence upon the development of later Platonic tradition; (...) Proclus, for instance, credits Xenocrates with a distinction between transcendent and immanent causation that became a central feature of Middle Platonism. Posidonius, a Stoic and Cicero's philosophical mentor, is important to the growing convergence of the schools because he introduced Platonism and Aristotelianism into his account of Stoicism, while Antiochus, a product of Philo of Larissa's sceptical Academy, pursued an eclectic Platonism. Alexander of Aphrodisias was the leading Peripatetic of Alexandria, around the second century ad; he revived an orthodox Aristotelianism, accepting Aristotle's four causes doctrine, and identifying Fate as an efficient cause. (shrink)

Open peer commentary on the article “A Cybernetic Approach to Contextual Teaching and Learning” by Philip Baron. Upshot: I consider implications of Baron’s article on change in university education. In particular, I address the problem of why change happens with difficulty and how the principles and practices of second-order cybernetics that Baron discusses are applicable beyond South Africa to a wide range of situations.

It has recently been argued that God’s causation of human free choices is best understood in light of Aquinas’s teaching on creation. Such a position is attractive because it provides a way of avoiding the compatibilism of classical interpretations of Aquinas. However, this position may be subject to other flaws. In fact, Francisco Suárez explicitly rejects the view that God’s creative causality can be understood either as the divine essence or as a predicamental relation of the created effect to God. (...) The purpose of this essay is to investigate, first, whether Suárez’s view of efficient causality rules out conceptualizing God’s motion of the will in terms of creation, and second, whether it provides a more plausible alternative. I argue on both points that it does not, and that an error common to both Suárez and his sixteenth-century opponents is one reason to conceptualize divine motion as a kind of creation. (shrink)

This study argues that the English-born, Edinburgh-educated and Bath-based physician William Falconer (1744–1824) authored the only stadial history published during the British Enlightenment that analysed the influence of socio-economic context upon religious belief. A survey of the conjectural histories of religion written by the leading literati demonstrates that discussion of religion by the Scottish literati was undertaken separate from the “Scottish narrative” of stadial economic and political progress. We have to turn to Falconer’s Remarks on the Influence of Climate (1781) (...) to see a four-stage history of religion that related belief and practice to wider social and economic developments. While heavily derivative of Montesquieu’s De l’Esprit des Lois (1748), Falconer’s Remarks has some claim to theoretical innovation and used his conjectural history to tell a story of English (not British) religious exceptionalism. Moreover, the work was received as a serious contribution to the late Enlightenment’s science of human nature and society. (shrink)

Determining what has gone wrong in a malfunctioning body and proposing an effective treatment requires expertise. Since antiquity, philosophers and doctors have wondered what sort of knowledge this expertise involves, and whether and how it can warrant its conclusions. Few people were as qualified to deal with these questions as Galen of Pergamum. A practising doctor with a keen interest in logic and natural science, he devoted much of his enormous literary output to the task of putting medicine on firm (...) methodological grounds. At the same time he reflected on philosophical issues entailed by this project, such as the nature of experience, its relation to reason, the criteria of truth, and the methods of justification. This volume explores Galen's contributions to epistemology, as they arise in the specific inquiries and polemics of his works, as well as their legacy in the Islamic world. (shrink)

Philosophy &Public Affairs, Volume 47, Issue 1, Page 72-103, Winter 2019.

This study investigated the performance of boys with psychopathic tendencies and comparison boys, aged 9 to 17 years, on two tasks believed to be sensitive to amygdala and orbitofrontal cortex func- tioning. Fifty-one boys were divided into two groups according to the Psychopathy Screening Device (PSD, P. J. Frick & R. D. Hare, in press) and presented with two tasks. The tasks were the gambling task (A. Bechara, A. R. Damasio, H. Damasio, & S. W. Anderson, 1994) and the Intradimensional/ (...) Extradimensional (ID/ED) shift task (R. Dias, T. W. Robbins, & A. C. Roberts, 1996). The boys with psychopathic tendencies showed impaired performance on the gambling task. However, there were no group differences on the ID/ED task either for response reversal or extradimensional set shifting. The implications of these results for models of psychopathy are discussed. (shrink)

R. J. Hankinson traces the history of ancient Greek thinking about causation and explanation, from its earliest beginnings through more than a thousand years to the middle of the first millennium of the Christian era. He examines ways in which the Ancient Greeks dealt with questions about how and why things happen as and when they do, about the basic constitution and structure of things, about function and purpose, laws of nature, chance, coincidence, and responsibility.

I Foundations i Every account of Nietzsche is an interpretation. Perhaps students of him are inclined to forget the extent to which this is also true of ...

This book is a new edition of a short but fascinating treatise by Galen on causal theory. This text survives only in a Latin translation of the fourteenth century, and it is this which appears here. The volume also contains the first translation of the treatise into any modern language, and the first philosophical commentary thereon. The commentary ranges widely in Galen's voluminous œuvre, and compares his views with those of other ancient theorists. The introduction deals in detail with Galen's (...) life and work, with the background both philosophical and medieval to his causal theory, and with the history of the text itself. (shrink)