Experiential evidence shows that pain is associated with common meanings. These include a meaning of threat or danger, which is experienced as immediately distressing or unpleasant; cognitive meanings, which are focused on the long-term consequences of having chronic pain; and existential meanings such as hopelessness, which are more about the person with chronic pain than the pain itself. This interdisciplinary book - the second in the three-volume Meanings of Pain series edited by Dr Simon van Rysewyk - aims to better (...) understand pain by describing experiences of pain and the meanings these experiences hold for the people living through them. The lived experiences of pain described here involve various types of chronic pain, including spinal pain, labour pain, rheumatic pain, diabetic peripheral neuropathic pain, fibromyalgia, complex regional pain syndrome, endometriosis-associated pain, and cancer-related pain. Two chapters provide narrative descriptions of pain, recounted and interpreted by people with pain. Language is important to understanding the meaning of pain since it is the primary tool human beings use to manipulate meaning. As discussed in the book, linguistic meaning may hold clues to understanding some pain-related experiences, including the stigmatisation of people with pain, the dynamics of patient-clinician communication, and other issues, such as relationships between pain, public policy and the law, and attempts to develop a taxonomy of pain that is meaningful for patients. Clinical implications are described in each chapter. This book is intended for people with pain, their family members or caregivers, clinicians, researchers, advocates, and policy makers. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, and: The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and PalamasDavid BradshawSaint Gregory Palamas. Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite. Translated by Rein Ferweda with Introduction by Sara J. Denning-Bolle. Binghamton, NY: Global Publications/CEMERS, 1999. Pp. 108. Paper, $17.00.A. N. Williams. The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. (...) Pp. 222. Cloth, $49.95.Gregory Palamas (1296-1359) was a Byzantine monk who rose to become Archbishop of Thessalonica and a leading theologian of the Orthodox Church. He is best known for his role in the hesychast controversy. The hesychasts (from hesychia, silence) were monks of Mount Athos who claimed that through prayer and ascetic struggle they had been enabled to see God with their bodily eyes. More precisely, they claimed to see a kind of divine radiance permeating all things, including their own bodies. They insisted that this light was not a created reality but was God himself as he manifested himself to them.When the hesychasts were attacked by an Italian monk named Barlaam, Palamas rose to their defense. The challenge he faced was that of explaining how the transcendent God could be visible to human eyes. His answer was to adapt two terms long in use in other areas of theology, ousia (substance, essence) and energeia (activity, operation). He held that whereas the ousia of God is unknowable to any created intellect, the divine energeiai can be shared in by creatures, who are thereby deified. The "uncreated light" of the monks is simply the divine energeia as it had become visible to the monks through the purification of the heart achieved by prayer, asceticism, and obedience to the divine commandments. Gregory's defense of the hesychasts was endorsed by a series of synods at Constantinople, and to this day he is commemorated in Orthodox churches on the second Sunday in Lent.The importance of Palamas for the history of philosophy lies in the fact that he presents a version of Christian thought that is deeply rooted in tradition, and by most standards fully orthodox, yet owes nothing to western scholasticism. A quick comparison [End Page 586] with Aquinas reveals several points of divergence. (1) Whereas Aquinas holds that all the divine attributes and activities are identical with the divine essence, the distinctions among them being merely quoad nos, Palamas holds that the distinction between the divine ousia and energeia is not just imposed by our perspective but is truly present in God. (2) Whereas Aquinas says little about deification and explicitly reserves the vision of the divine essence to the afterlife, Palamas insists that deification is possible in this life and that the condition of those who experience it is similar (though of course not identical) to that of the blessed after the resurrection. (3) Whereas Aquinas allows that the blessed ultimately do attain a vision of the divine essence, Palamas holds that the divine ousia is intrinsically unknowable to creatures.Whether these differences are as sharp as they seem is a matter that requires careful investigation. The first of the two works under review, Palamas's Dialogue Between an Orthodox and a Barlaamite, is to be welcomed for the clarification it provides of Palamas's views. It is the third of his major works to be translated into English, the others being Triads in Defense of the Holy Hesychasts and One Hundred and Fifty Chapters. I confess to finding it less engaging than the other two; it lacks the freshness and vigor of the Triads (Palamas's earliest work) and the wide-ranging systematic character of the Chapters. Nonetheless, it does provide a helpful elaboration of the ousia -energeia distinction, particularly in the argument (88-90) that such a distinction does not compromise divine simplicity.The second work, The Ground of Union: Deification in Aquinas and Palamas by A. N. Williams, is the first book-length comparison of these two pivotal figures. It is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation, and has a certain plodding dryness characteristic of the genre; nonetheless, it is clear and well-informed, and Williams is... (shrink)

Überblicken wir noch einmal das ganze riesige Gebiet des Geistesgeschehens vor und nach der Jahrhundertwende, soweit es darwinistische Züge erkennen läßt, so können wir eines feststellen : Ausgenommen die Konservativen und die Kirchen, die beide angesichts des stürmischen Vorwärtsdrängens darwinistischer Gedankengänge in die Defensive gehen müssen, bedienen sich so gut wie alle geistigen Strömungen des Darwinismus: Die Sozialisten, weil Darwins "Naturtheorie" mit ihrer Gesetzlichkeit des biologischen Fortschritts Gewähr zu bieten scheint, daß auch im Gesellschaftlichen eherne Gesetze des Fortschritts walten, und (...) weil sie aus dem Darwinismus den Beweis für die Gleichheit aller Menschen herauslesen. Die Sozialdarwinisten, weil ihnen Darwins Lehre vom Kampf ums Dasein und von der Auslese der Lebensfähigsten angeblich den Beweis liefert für die Ungleichheit der Menschen und für die Notwendigkeit einer Menschenzucht. Nicht zufällig sprießen um 1890 so viele Zuchtvereine aus dem Boden, weil man in Charles Darwin den großen Pflanzen-, Tier- und Menschenzüchter sah. Die Atheisten, weil mit der Affenabstammung jegliches göttliche Wirken beim Werden des Menschengeschlechts widerlegt sei. Die pantheistischen Schwärmer von Friedrichshagen, weil sie ein Entwicklungsgesetz am Werk zu sehen glauben, das ganz folgerichtig zu immer Besserem, Edlerem, Vollkommnerem, Vergeistigterem führen müsse. Die Verteidiger einer "Leistungsaristokratie". (shrink)

In this paper we look at the suitability of modern interval-based temporal logic for modeling John Buridan’s treatment of tensed sentences in his Sophismata. Building on the paper, we develop Buridan’s analysis of temporal logic, paying particular attention to his notions of negation and the absolute/relative nature of the future and the past.We introduce a number of standard modern propositional interval temporal logics to illustrate where Buridan’s interval-based temporal analysis differs from the standard modern approaches. We give formal proofs of (...) some claims in, and sketch how the standard modern systems could be defined in terms of Buridan’s proposals, showing that his logic can be taken as more basic. In diesem Aufsatz betrachten wir das Geeignetsein einer modernen intervallbasierten temporalen Logik für die Modellierung von John Buridans Behandlung zeitabhängiger Sätze in seinen Sophismata. Aufbauend auf den Aufsatz stellen wir Buridans Analyse der temporalen Logik dar, mit besonderer Berücksichtigung seiner Begriffe der Negation und der absoluten/relativen Natur der Zukunft und der Vergangenheit. Wir führen einige standardmäßige moderne intervallbasierte temporale Aussagenlogiken ein, um zu illustrieren, wo Buridans intervallbasierte temporale Analyse von den standardmäßigen modernen Zugangsweisen abweicht. Wir geben formale Beweise einiger Behauptungen in an und skizzieren, wie die standardmäßigen modernen Systeme im Sinne der Vorschläge Buridans definiert werden könnten; wir zeigen damit, dass seine Logik als die grundlegendere aufgefasst werden kann. (shrink)

Dieser Artikel ist eine analytische Besprechung eines kürzlich erschienenen Bandes von Evandro Agazzi, nämlich Das Wissen des Unsichtbaren. Es zeigt auf, wie Agazzi vom Glauben ausgeht, um die zentrale Bedeutung der Vernunft zu entwickeln. Eines der zentralen Themen ist die Erkenntnistheorie der Religion. Den Abschluss bildet eine kurze Erwähnung des Begriffs der Hoffnung.

Trotz der Hinweise an wichtigen Stellen in Kants Schriften richtet die Kantforschung ihre Aufmerksamkeit nur selten auf die Jahrhunderte währende Tradition der Kasuistik und den Begriff des Gewissens, der in ihrem Rahmen ausgearbeitet wird. Eingehend untersucht wird in diesem Buch insbesondere der Zeitabschnitt von Pascals "Briefen in die Provinz" bis zu Kants eigener Kritik des Probabilismus und seinem Entwurf einer Kasuistik als Teil der ethischen Methodenlehre.

Kant scholars have rarely addressed the centuries-old tradition of casuistry and the concept of conscience in Kant’s writings. This book offers a detailed exploration of the period from Pascal’s Provincial Letters to Kant’s critique of probabilism and discusses his proposal of a (new) casuistry as part of an moral education. *** -/- Die Debatte um Kasuistik und Probabilismus zählt zu den wichtigsten Themen der Moraltheologie und Moralphilosophie der frühen Neuzeit. In der enormen Verbreitung der Literatur über die Gewissensfälle (casus conscientiae) (...) und in der großen Resonanz der Lehre von den wahrscheinlichen Meinungen (opiniones probabiles) in der ersten Hälfte des 17. Jahrhunderts findet sich ein wirkungsmächtiges Modell für die Analyse des moralischen Handelns, in welchem Universalität des Gebots und Kontingenz der Handlung, Notwendigkeit der Norm und individuelle Freiheit miteinander versöhnt werden. Dennoch erregt dieses Modell heftige Kritik, die in Pascals berühmtem Angriff in den Briefen in die Provinz (1656–1657) gipfelt. So beginnt für die Kasuistik und den Probabilismus eine lange Krise, welche die Entstehung der modernen Moralphilosophie und den Siegeszug des kantischen Paradigmas ankündigt. Die Krise von Kasuistik und Probabilismus fällt zusammen mit einer einsetzenden rigoristischen Reaktion der christlichen Moraltheologie sowohl katholischer als auch protestantischer Prägung,welche die moralischen und spekulativen Folgen eines Rückgriffs auf Gewissensfälle und wahrscheinliche Meinungen als inakzeptabel ablehnt. Die Ablehnung geht aber weiter und dringt bis in den Kern der philosophischen Reflexion vor: Die rigoristische Reaktion gegen Kasuistik und Probabilismus entzündet sich im moralphilosophischen Denken Kants als Folge seiner umfassenden kritischen Revision der Grundbegriffe der Moralphilosophie sowie insbesondere seiner Neubestimmung des Verhältnisses von Gewissen und praktischem Urteil. Dem Grundsatz des Probabilismus setzt Kant das Kriterium der moralischen Gewißheit („quod dubitas, ne feceris!“) entgegen, das er als „Postulat des Gewissens“ bezeichnet (RGV 6:185.23–186.9).Und die Kasuistik wird als eine „Critic der Handlungen nach Sophistic“ abgestempelt, als eine „Uebung, um nach der Sophistic das Gewissen zu hintergehen oder es zu chicaniren, insofern man es in Irrthum zu setzen denkt“ (V-MS/Vigil 27:620.2–5). Dennoch weist Kant den kasuistischen Fragen eine herausragende Stellung in der Tugendlehre zu und legt der Kasuistik im Rahmen der ethischen Methodenlehre, also im Hinblick auf pädagogische Anwendungen, letztlich eine positive Funktion bei. Vermutlich ist Kants Angriff auf Kasuistik und Probabilismus durch den Einfluss Pascals philosophisch vermittelt. Kants Verhältnis zu Pascal und, allgemeiner, zu dem historischen Hintergrund, welchem dieser angehört, sind gleichwohl noch erstaunlich wenig erforscht: Trotz der wiederholten (stillschweigenden oder sogar ausdrücklichen) Hinweise an wichtigen Stellen in Kants Schriften richtet die Kant-Forschung ihre Aufmerksamkeit nur selten auf die Jahrhunderte währende Tradition der Kasuistik und den Begriff des Gewissens, der in ihrem Rahmen ausgearbeitet wird. Aus dieser langen Geschichte wird in diesem Band insbesondere der Zeitraum „von Pascal bis Kant“ eingehend untersucht, d.h. der noch wenig erkundete Zeitabschnitt von der beißenden Polemik von Pascals Briefe in die Provinz bis zu Kants eigener Kritik des Probabilismus und seinem Entwurf einer (neuen) Kasuistik als Teil der ethischen Methodenlehre. (shrink)

Präzision ist ein Schlüsselbegriff in Technik, Kunst und Wissenschaft, der in enger Verbindung mit Verfahren der Messung und Feinmechanik steht, aber auch die Schärfe sprachlicher Begriffsbildung oder die Synchronisation tänzerischer Bewegungen beschreiben kann. Die Wissenschaftsgeschichte zeigt, dass der Bedarf nach grösstmöglicher Präzision auch die Widersprüche von Messung und Modell, Versuch und Vorhersage in sich aufgenommen hat - abweichende Messergebnisse wurden so zum eigentlichen Beleg für die Genauigkeit einer Methode und den Bedarf ihrer weiteren Raffinierung. Der interdisziplinäre Blick auf verschiedene Felder (...) zeigt, wie der damit verbundene Anspruch in ihnen produktiv gemacht und reflektiert worden ist. Fallstudien zu Beispielen aus mehreren Jahrhunderten gehen dieser Frage nach, ergänzt um Auszüge aus grundlegenden historisch-theoretischen Beiträgen. (shrink)

In this paper Peirce's notion of sign is studied to try to characterize the artistic sign as representation. Then, some considerations about the work of art as a sign are developed involving three elements: experience, expression and interpretation. Finally it is concluded that beauty requires for Peirce a peculiar balance, the imaginative conjunction of the sensible and the reasonable in an artistic sign; it requires moreover the expression of something that transcends the sensible; it requires, as a sign, an interpretation (...) which is not exact and which implies growth. It requires, finally, love, because an artist will only reach beauty guided by agape updating and harmonizing possibilities through abduction, that is, creating new signs that give form to what does not have it; the artist only reaches beauty when he loves what he does and when he can express himself freely. -/- En este artículo se estudia, en primer lugar, la noción de signo de Peirce para tratar de caracterizar después el signo artístico como representación. Se desarrollan enseguida algunas consideraciones sobre la obra de arte como signo que como tal conlleva tres elementos: experiencia, expresión e interpretación. Finalmente se concluye que la belleza requiere para Peirce un peculiar equilibrio, la conjunción imaginativa de lo sensible y lo razonable en un signo artístico; requiere además la expresión de algo que trasciende lo sensible; requiere, en tanto signo, de una interpretación que no es exacta y que implica crecimiento. Requiere, por último, amor, pues el artista solo alcanzará lo bello cuando sea guiado por el ágape y a través de la abducción vaya actualizando y armonizando posibilidades, creando nuevos signos que den forma a lo que no la tiene, cuando ame lo que hace y se exprese libremente. (shrink)

Kant scholars have rarely addressed the centuries-old tradition of casuistry and the concept of conscience in Kant’s writings. This book offers a detailed exploration of the period from Pascal’s Provincial Letters to Kant’s critique of probabilism and discusses his proposal of a (new) casuistry as part of an moral education. / Trotz der Hinweise an wichtigen Stellen in Kants Schriften richtet die Kantforschung ihre Aufmerksamkeit nur selten auf die Jahrhunderte währende Tradition der Kasuistik und den Begriff des Gewissens, der in (...) ihrem Rahmen ausgearbeitet wird. Eingehend untersucht wird in diesem Buch insbesondere der Zeitabschnitt von Pascals »Briefen in die Provinz« bis zu Kants eigener Kritik des Probabilismus und seinem Entwurf einer (neuen) Kasuistik als Teil der ethischen Methodenlehre. (shrink)

Arguments from faultless disagreement appeal to the possibility of mistake-free disagreement as evidence for semantic relativism. Typically, these arguments focus on paradigmatically subjective topics such as taste, aesthetics, and comedy. Many philosophers hold that ethics is also a subjective topic. But so far, there has been little discussion of faultless disagreement in ethics. In this paper, I advance an argument from faultless moral disagreement, in favour of a relativist semantics for ethics.

Metaethical relativism is the view that whether a moral claim is true depends on the standards endorsed by an individual or society. This view is attractive because it allows one to hold that moral claims can be true or false in an ordinary correspondence sense, without being committed to the view that moral claims state objective facts. But what could it mean to say that a whether a moral claim is true depends on an individual or society’s standards? How could (...) a single claim be true or false in an ordinary sense, and yet be true for some people while false for others? This thesis defends a certain answer to this question: metaethical truth relativism. Metaethical relativists have historically endorsed a different view: content relativism, which is the view that the semantic contents of moral claims vary across contexts of use. However, semanticists working outside metaethics have recently shown that an alternative exists, namely truth relativism: the view that the truth values of moral contents vary across contexts. Metaethicists have been slow to investigate the significance of this discovery. This is surprising, because truth relativism appears to avoid some of the most influential objections to content relativist views. Thus, this development in semantics appears to offer an exciting new direction for research on relativism in metaethics. The scope of this thesis is not narrowly semantic, however. Questions in moral semantics often interconnect with questions in substantive metaethics, and the question of whether ethical thought and talk is semantically relativistic is no exception. Therefore, while the core of the this thesis focuses on moral semantics, it also contains a fair amount of substantive metaethical material, located primarily in the first and final chapters. The plan of the thesis is as follows. Chapters 1 & 2 begin with a discussion of the most historically influential argument for metaethical relativism: the argument from disagreement. Chapter 1 discusses an epistemic version of this argument, but concludes that this version provides only limited evidence for relativism. However, chapter 2 introduces a different version of the argument, with a more semantic focus, and begins to make the case that this argument provides evidence not only for metaethical relativism broadly construed, but for truth relativism in particular. The broad strokes of this argument are that there can be moral disagreements which are faultless and furthermore that only truth relativism can vindicate the sense that these are genuine disagreements, rather than mere differences of opinion. Chapter 2 presents empirical evidence for the claim that putative moral disagreements can be faultless. Chapters 3 and 4 then take a deep dive into the topic of disagreement. Chapter 3 develops a positive account of disagreement which is available only to truth relativists. And chapter 4 advances detailed arguments against contextualist accounts of disagreement. Chapters 3 and 4 together thus defend in detail the claim that truth relativism can, while content relativism cannot, account for the sense that there is genuine disagreement in the relevant cases. Chapters 2 through 4, therefore, form a single long argument for truth relativism. They show that there is a compelling argument for relativism broadly construed, and that deep analysis of the issues surrounding this argument favour truth relativism over content relativism. Chapter 5 zooms back out to the broader metaethical landscape, discussing two remaining objections to relativism. The first objection is that relativism has objectionably subjectivistic implications, and the second is that moral standards cannot helpfully be understood as determined by societies. In the course of responding to these objections, natural opportunities to flesh out the substantive metaethical commitments of the theory will arise. And this will set us up to conclude with a brief comparison of truth relativism with some of the other main options in the space of substantive metaethical theory. (shrink)

Picking up on the themes of ISP responsibility and trust raised by Raphael Cohen-Almagor, this paper discusses the problem of removing inappropriate content from the Internet. It suggests that an approach based on community involvement such as used by YouTube may be preferable to one that relies on artificial intelligence to detect inappropriate content. The paper also suggests ways in which ISPs could help increase trust in the Internet by strengthening security.

Over the past two decades, William Kentridge has consolidated a worldwide reputation as an artist of great verve and scope. He is arguably most widely known for his series of 10 animated films drawn over a period of 22 years, and set in his home city of Johannesburg. Originally conceived as a distraction, something to fill the gaps between exhibitions, the films have magnificently exceeded their brief, establishing instead one of the great characters in contemporary fiction: Soho EcksteinHighveld mining magnate, (...) and Kentridge s alter ego. The timeline of the films covers South Africa s transition from apartheid to democracy. The specific events and crises comprising the country s political transformation form the backdrop to the story unfolding across the screen, but the films are not "about" political events. Instead the saga traces a different and parallel arcSoho s gradual awakening from capitalist blockhead and cuckold to sober penitent, coming to terms with his own frailties and the first signs of mortalityand it is this human quality that gives the films their power and enduring appeal. Matthew Kentridge has witnessed, from first beginnings, the evolution of William Kentridge s technique, themes and ideas. From his unique and privileged vantage point, he has watched the transformation of Soho from individualistic South African megalomaniac into a kind of late-twentieth-century Everyman. This book is his response. This volume also incorporates an element of augmented reality, which readers can explore using their smartphones or tablets, making the book an even more enriching experience.". (shrink)

In this paper I present a novel taxonomy of envy, according to which there are four kinds of envy: emulative, inert, aggressive and spiteful envy. An inquiry into the varieties of envy is valuable not only to understand it as a psychological phenomenon, but also to shed light on the nature of its alleged viciousness. The first section introduces the intuition that there is more than one kind of envy, together with the anecdotal and linguistic evidence that supports it. The (...) second section proposes and explains in detail a definition of envy tout court. The third section presents a recurring distinction between behavioral tendencies of envy, which has been explained in two distinct ways, one mostly proposed by psychologists, the other discernible in the philosophical tradition. The fourth section argues that these models of explanation track two variables, whose interplay is responsible for the existence of the four envies. The fifth section illustrates four paradigmatic cases, and provides a detailed analysis of the phenomenology, motivational structure, and typical behavioral outputs of each. The paper ends with a brief discussion of the implications of the taxonomy for moral education. (shrink)

A general method for generating contraction- and cut-free sequent calculi for a large family of normal modal logics is presented. The method covers all modal logics characterized by Kripke frames determined by universal or geometric properties and it can be extended to treat also Gödel-Löb provability logic. The calculi provide direct decision methods through terminating proof search. Syntactic proofs of modal undefinability results are obtained in the form of conservativity theorems.

What do the terms sex and gender identity, or gender history, mean in a medical context? When does it matter to a healthcare professional whether a patient has male or female reproductive biology?...

Should all digital communication be accessible to government inspection? Is robust cryptography in the hands of the public a threat to our national security? With Dorothy Denning and Patrick Sullivan.

Free will, if such there be, involves free choosing: the ability to mentally choose an outcome, where the outcome is 'free' in being, in some substantive sense, up to the agent of the choice. As such, it is clear that the questions of how to understand free will and mental causation are connected, for events of seemingly free choosing are mental events that appear to be efficacious vis-a-vis other mental events as well as physical events. Nonetheless, the free will and (...) mental causation debates have proceeded largely independently of each other. Here we aim to make progress in determining how the free will and mental causation debates bear on one another. We first argue that the problems of free will and of mental causation can be seen as special cases of a more general problem, concerning whether and how mental events of a given type may be efficacious, qua the types of event they are---qualitative, intentional, freely deliberative---given their apparent causal irrelevancy for effects of the type in question; here we generalize what Horgan 1989 identifies as "the problem of mental quausation" (S1). We then build on this result to identify fruitful parallels between hard determinism and eliminative physicalism (S2) and soft determinism and non-reductive physicalism (S3). (shrink)

The Judith Butler Reader is a collection of writings that span her impressive career and trace her intellectual history. Judith Butler, author of influential books such as Gender Trouble, has built her international reputation as a theorist of power, gender, sexuality and identity Organized in active collaboration between Judith Butler and Sara Salih Collects together writings that span Butler’s impressive career as a critical philosopher, including selections from both well-known and lesser-known works Includes an introduction and editorial material to (...) assist students in their readings of theories that stand at the forefront of contemporary theoretical and political debates. (shrink)

The axiomatic presentation of modal systems and the standard formulations of natural deduction and sequent calculus for modal logic are reviewed, together with the difficulties that emerge with these approaches. Generalizations of standard proof systems are then presented. These include, among others, display calculi, hypersequents, and labelled systems, with the latter surveyed from a closer perspective.

In juxtaposition with the myth and tragedy of Ovid’s Medea, this paper investigates the possibility within the Kantian conception of agency of understanding moral evil as acting against one’s better judgment. It defends the thesis that in Kant self-deception, i. e. the intentional untruthfulness to oneself, provides the fundamental structure for choosing against the moral law. I argue that, as Kant’s thought progresses, self-deception slowly proceeds to become the paradigmatic case of moral evil. This is discussed with regard to two (...) important topics in his later moral philosophy: the doctrine of radical evil and the crucial role of the duty of truthfulness in ethics. The inquiry into Kant’s theory of conscience unfolds both against this theoretical background and in light of its historical roots in the polemic against casuistry and probabilism. This contribution closes with a brief look at the tools Kant implements to counter this tendency to self-deception in moral judgment and particularly at the role casuistry plays within his conception of moral education. (shrink)

Several commentators have argued that with his concept of anonymity Merleau-Ponty breaks away from classical Husserlian phenomenology that is methodologically tied to the first person perspective. Many contemporary commentators see Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity as a break away from Husserl’s framework that is seen as hopelessly subjectivistic and solipsistic. Some judge and reproach it as a disastrous misunderstanding that leads to a confusion of philosophical and empirical concerns. Both parties agree that Merleau-Ponty’s concepts of anonymity mark a divergence from classical (...) Husserlian phenomenology. I will question this view and demonstrate that Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity remains Husserlian in two important senses: it analyses senses in terms of constituting selves and communities of such selves, and it accounts for the formation of experience by the temporal sedimentation of intentional activity. The argument proceeds in four steps. The first section argues against the widely spread notion according to which Merleau-Ponty’s anonymous subject is collective. In the second section, I offer an alternative reading by demonstrating that Merleau-Ponty uses the term “anonymous” primarily to characterize the lived body of a personal subject. In section three, I introduce Merleau-Ponty’s idea of trace and show that for him both the perceived thing and the perceiving body are traces and as such refer to earlier constitutive acts of alien subjects. I then argue that Husserl’s concepts of sedimentation are crucial for the understanding of this idea. Finally, in section four, I show how Husserl’s theory of depresentation informs Merleau-Ponty’s discourse on anonymity. (shrink)

We appreciate Chapman and colleagues’ (2025) advocacy for revising the Common Rule to address the downstream effects of data-centric research, particularly the potential for group harms such as sti...

Die gängigen Prognosen, nach denen die Religionen im Kontext der Moderne oder im Zuge der Globalisierung an Bedeutung verlieren würden, haben sich nicht bestätigt. Das Gegenteil ist der Fall: Jenseits von nihilistischen Entwürfen und virtuellen Konstruktionen öffneten sich auch und gerade in der Literatur Räume für die Belebung religiöser Weltsicht. Ausgehend von Heinrich Böll und seiner Anfang der 1960er Jahre eingeleiteten Distanzierung von der Institution Kirche, wird am Beispiel von Botho Strauß und Peter Handke, die seit den 1970er und 1980er (...) Jahren eine ins Metaphysische zielende Subjektivität repräsentieren, eine Renaissance des Religiösen konstatiert, die sich in den Werken des jüngeren Autors Ralf Rothmann seit den 1990er Jahren mit selbstbewusster Deutlichkeit fortschreibt. Anhand der geistesgeschichtlichen Trias Gnostizismus, Philosophie und Mystik nimmt die Verfasserin eine Fokussierung vor, die die ästhetischen Konzeptionen der Autoren deutlich werden lässt und sie zueinander in Beziehung setzt. (shrink)

What does the term academic ethics mean? How does this term relate to others in the academic integrity literature, such as research misconduct? Does conceptual confusion in the study of academic ethics complicate development of valid analyses of ethical behavior in an academic setting? The intended goal of many empirical projects on academic ethics is to draw causal conclusions about the factors that lead to faculty or students possessing or disregarding academic integrity. Yet, it is not clear that scholars using (...) the concept academic ethics are measuring the same phenomenon when they use associated concepts, such as responsible conduct of research. The purpose of this paper is to develop a taxonomy of concepts for the empirical study of academic ethics. Based in research on comparative analysis of democracy, another normatively preferable but multifaceted concept, I argue for a taxonomy of concepts for the study of academic integrity that reduces problems of “conceptual stretching” and challenges to the validity of empirical research in this field. (shrink)

The importance of the hidden curriculum is recognised as a practical training ground for the absorption of medical ethics by healthcare professionals. Pakistan’s healthcare sector is hampered by the exclusion of ethics from medical and nursing education curricula and the absence of monitoring of ethical violations in the clinical setting. Nurses have significant knowledge of the hidden curriculum taught during clinical practice, due to long working hours in the clinic and front-line interaction with patients and other practitioners.

This chapter develops an alternative to the dominant articulation of human existence on the basis of classical phenomenology, arguing that Edmund Husserl's phenomenological inquiries into the structures of embodiment provide a very different and more fruitful starting point for the investigation of sexual difference than the ideas of social gender and biological sex. The ways of classifying sex and gender characteristics mark them out on several different conceptual bases, and thus their categories may not correspond or coincide. Moreover historical and (...) biological inquiries indicate that the dimorphic notion of sex is prescriptive and constructive. Finally the sex/gender paradigm is dominated by the explanatory framework of causes and effects. The phenomenological analysis shows that the causal-functional framework is inadequate for the investigation of the plurality of the bodily existence and sexual difference as a dimension of this existence. In the light of the explication of the concepts of sex and gender, and the phenomenological analysis of embodiment, the sex/gender paradigm cannot offer a basis for a comprehensive philosophy of sexual existence. (shrink)

This paper analyzes the rhetoric surrounding the profession’s presentations of auditor independence. We trace the evolution of thecharacter of the auditor from Professional Man in the early years of the twentieth century to the more public and abstract figures of Judicial Man and Economic Man. The changing character of the auditor in the profession’s narratives of legitimation reflects changes in the role of auditing, in the economic environment, and in the values of American society. Economic man is a self-interested and (...) shallow character who offered the auditing profession little protection against involvement in corporate scandals. In the wake of recent accounting scandals, the profession is calling for a return to the character of Professional Man to restore trust in audits and the financial markets.We also analyze the philosophical bases of the metaphors surrounding auditor independence. These metaphors, particularly the metaphor of independence as separation, create problems in conceptualizing independence concepts. How can you discuss appropriate relationships when your basic concept is one of separation, or no relationship? On the other hand, relational concepts of independence are also flawed if they are not based on a firm moral foundation. We suggest how the profession can act to rebuildits moral foundation through recognition of collective responsibility. (shrink)

Though Arthur Prior is now best known for his founding of modern temporal logic and hybrid logic, much of his early philosophical career was devoted to history of logic and historical logic. This interest laid the foundations for both of his ground-breaking innovations in the 1950s and 1960s. Because of the important rôle played by Prior's research in ancient and medieval logic in his development of temporal and hybrid logic, any student of Prior, temporal logic, or hybrid logic should be (...) familiar with the medieval logicians and their work. In this article we give an overview of Prior's work in ancient and medieval logic. (shrink)

This paper supports the need for health professionals to be trained in argumentation theory, by illustrating the challenges that they face in interacting with patients and according to the different models of consultation that patients prefer. While there is no ideal model of consultation that can be promoted universally, the ability to construct arguments in support of health professionals’ points of view, as well as the ability to engage in critical discussion with patients, translate in essential skills for reaching patients’ (...) agreement when communication develops through the interpretative model or the informed decision model or, eventually, shared decision-making. Keywords: models of consultation, argumentation skills, medical training, patient-centeredness, informed consent. (shrink)

In this study, we examine the narratives of Hungarian entrepreneurs with disabilities (EWD) of the post-socialist era, using microhistory. Our research question concerns how ableism appears in the lives of EWD and how the aftermath of socialism emerges in their experience of ableism. We believe that a state-socialist past influences the lives and careers of EWD in a way that is unique in entrepreneurial and disability literature. Drawing on the accounts of 29 Hungarian entrepreneurs, we identified four mechanisms that make (...) post-socialist ableism specific: invisibility; passivity and welfare dependency; the legitimacy of disability organisations; as well as the limitations of economic participation. Our research suggests that these effects, embedded in the current political, social, and economic environment, can only change slowly and over a long time. (shrink)

Trafficking for Sexual Exploitation (TFSE) is a historical phenomenon, connected to the social and sexual organization of labour. It survives because a part of the population is considered a lucrative commodity, in a global business operation that causes millions of victims worldwide nowadays. The protection of the fundamental rights of victims is not considered top priority by States, compared to the priorization given to irregular migration and organized crime control. Thus, this situation supposes a disregard of human trafficking as a (...) violation of Human Rights. This approach transcends TFSE and argues that the violations of Human Rights implicit in human trafficking are linked to the sexual division of labour, differentially affecting men and women. Furthermore, TFSE is already formally recognized as a form of gender violence. Women around the world are in socially inequality positions that are conducive to the risk of being trafficked, especially for sexual exploitation. This paper deals with a contextualized reflection on the case of Spain, as a border-territory of the European Union. (shrink)

Beller, Bender, and Medin (this issue) offer a provocative proposal outlining several reasons why anthropology and the rest of cognitive science might consider parting ways. Among those reasons, they suggest that separation might maintain the diversity needed to address larger problems facing humanity, and that the research strategies used across the disciplines are already so diverse as to be incommensurate. The present paper challenges the view that research strategies are incommensurate and offers a multimethod approach to cultural research that can (...) help to establish common ground while maintaining diversity. (shrink)

Traditional flat-structured bigram and trigram models of phonotactics are useful because they capture a large number of facts about phonological processes. Additionally, these models predict that local interactions should be easier to learn than long-distance ones because long-distance dependencies are difficult to capture with these models. Long-distance phonotactic patterns have been observed by linguists in many languages, who have proposed different kinds of models, including feature-based bigram and trigram models, as well as precedence models. Contrary to flat-structured bigram and trigram (...) models, these alternatives capture unbounded dependencies because at an abstract level of representation, the relevant elements are locally dependent, even if they are not adjacent at the observable level. Using an artificial grammar learning paradigm, we provide additional support for these alternative models of phonotactics. Participants in two experiments were exposed to a long-distance consonant-harmony pattern in which the first consonant of a five-syllable word was [s] or [∫] (“sh”) and triggered a suffix that was either [-su] or [-∫u] depending on the sibilant quality of this first consonant. Participants learned this pattern, despite the large distance between the trigger and the target, suggesting that when participants learn long-distance phonological patterns, that pattern is learned without specific reference to distance. (shrink)

This book discusses feature films that enrich our understanding of doctor-patient dilemmas. The book comprises general clinical ethics themes and principles and is written in accessible language. Each theme is discussed and illuminated in chapters devoted to a particular film. Chapters start with a discussion of the film itself, which shares details behind the making of the film; critical reception; casting and other facts about production. The chapter situates the film in a history of medicine and medical sociology context, analyzes (...) ethical issues raised in the film from a clinical ethics lens, and explains to readers how to use each film as a teaching aid for clinical ethics. Readers will understand how each film in this collection served to bring particular clinical ethics issues to the public’s attention, or reflected medico-legal issues that were part of the public discourse. The book is a perfect instructor's guide for anyone teaching bioethics, healthcare ethics, medical sociology, medical history, healthcare systems narrative medicine, or nursing ethics. (shrink)