A survey of developments in twentieth-century philosophy of mind in the analytic or Anglo-American tradition, focussing in particular on the fortunes of physicalist views of mind.

In this paper, I argue that the supposition of divine omnipotence entails a contradiction: omnipotence both must and must not be intrinsic to God. Hence, traditional theism must be rejected. To begin, I separate out some theoretical distinctions needed to inform the discussion. I then advance two different arguments for the conclusion that omnipotence must be intrinsic to God; these utilise the notions of essence and aseity. Next, I argue that some necessary conditions on being omnipotent are extrinsic, and that (...) this means omnipotence cannot be intrinsic to God. I consider three different ways of resolving this conflict, but contend that each is unsuccessful. Before concluding, I explain why the type of strategy used to resolve the traditional paradoxes of omnipotence cannot be successfully employed against the paradox presented here. (shrink)

Mélia en a assez des sobriquets et remarques désobligeantes que lui valent quotidiennement ses cheveux extrêmement courts, qui entraînent de surcroît les gens à la confondre avec un garçon. "Pour avoir l'air d'une vraie fille" et séduire ainsi le beau Jérôme, la fillette se met donc en tête de prendre tous les moyens possibles pour faire allonger sa chevelure dans les plus brefs délais. Mais voilà, potions magiques et perruques causent des désagréments qu'elle n'avait pas envisagés... Et si la patience (...) et le naturel étaient encore les meilleurs des remèdes? -- Un roman empreint à la fois d'humour et de sensibilité qui démontre que la véritable beauté ne réside pas dans les standards véhiculés par la société et que la féminité ne passe pas forcément par ces derniers. Quelques illustrations stylisées en noir et blanc accompagnent le récit, porté par une écriture vive et rythmée, qui pourra notamment aider les enfants suivant des traitements médicaux à accepter et surmonter la perte de leurs cheveux. [SDM]. (shrink)

One thing that has to be considered in this process is the place of philosophy itself (Williams 2011 [1985], 4). Politicians often argue that they have no right to keep their hands clean, and that...

In this paper, we theorize that the anticipation of guilt plays an important role in ethically questionable consumer situations. We propose an ethical decision-making framework incorporating anticipated guilt as partial mediator between consumers' ethical beliefs (anteceded by ethical ideology) and intentions. In the first study, we compared several models using structural equation modeling and found empirical support for our research model. A second experiment was set up to illustrate how these new insights may be applied to prevent consumers from taking (...) advantage of the seller. Results showed that enhancing the anticipation of guilt (by making the interpersonal consequences of the unethical act more salient) increased consumers' ethical intentions, controlling for ethical beliefs. Together these two studies might have important theoretical and managerial contributions. (shrink)

In the euthanasia debate, the argument from mercy holds that if someone is in unbearable pain and is hopelessly ill or injured, then mercy dictates that inflicting death may be morally justified. One common way of setting the stage for the argument from mercy is to draw parallels between human and animal suffering, and to suggest that insofar as we are prepared to relieve an animal’s suffering by putting it out of its misery we should likewise be prepared to offer (...) the same relief to human beings. In this paper, I will argue that the use of parallels between human and animal suffering in the argument from mercy relies upon truncated views of how the concept of a human being enters our moral thought and responsiveness. In particular, the focus on the nature and extent of the empirical similarities between human beings and animals obscures the significance for our moral lives of the kind of human fellowship which is not reducible to the shared possession of empirical capacities. I will suggest that although a critical examination of the blindspots in these arguments does not license the conclusion that euthanasia for mercy’s sake is never morally permissible, it does limit the power of arguments such as those provided by Rachels and Singer to justify it. I will further suggest that examination of these blindspots helps to deepen our understanding of what is at stake in the question of euthanasia in ways that tend otherwise to remain obscured. (shrink)

To isolate, analyze and explain their most basic commitments, theories of justice typically idealize. They assume for theoretical purposes, for example, that human beings possess far greater knowledge than they do, or that society's members strictly comply with just laws. Yet because it falsifies, idealization undermines the practical applicability of an ideal theory's principles. ;Although ideal theories are unsatisfactory as they stand, their fundamental principles may be invaluable in addressing our problems of justice. From such basic principles we may derive (...) intermediate ones that bridge the gap between ideal world and real, and allow us to determine what ideal theory demands in actual circumstances. ;Going beyond others who recognize the need, but themselves offer only ideal theories, I develop a set of these intermediate principles. I examine Kant's theory of justice as a paradigm, and identify problems it cannot address because they have their source in non-ideal features, including limited knowledge, imperfect will and preexisting social injustice. I then appeal to a modified version of the perspective of the ideal citizen that Kant employs in the Rechtslehre. This modified perspective enables us to articulate principles that give effect to Kant's universal law of justice and categorical imperative in non-ideal circumstances. Illustrating its use in addressing issues such as prison reform and exclusionary zoning, I argue that augmented ideal theory can play a crucial role in our pursuit of social justice. (shrink)

Depuis quelques années, les historiens critiquent l’idée que la France ait développé tardivement l’État providence en mettant en avant le rôle joué par les associations et la coopération privé-public dans la charité auprès des indigents au XIXe siècle. Ce système d’assistance élaboré peu à peu était plus répandu que l’on n’imagine et il a également façonné la nature de l’État providence au XXe siècle. Christine Adams se situe dans cette approche renouvelée par des études sur la plus important...

"Charles Marville is widely acknowledged as one of the most talented photographers of the nineteenth century. Accompanying a major retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery of Art in honor of Marville's bicentennial, Charles Marville: Photographer of Paris surveys the artist's entire career. This beautiful book, which begins with the city scenes and architectural views Marville made throughout France and Germany in the 1850s, also explores his portraits and landscapes s before turning to his photographs of Paris made both before and (...) after the city's dramatic modernization in the 1850s and 1860s. Commissioned to record the city in transition, Marville created one of the earliest and most powerful photographic series documenting urban transformation on a grand scale. Despite the importance of his work, Marville has long been an enigma in the history of photography, in part because many of the documents about his life were thought to have been lost in a fire that destroyed Paris's city hall in 1871. Based on meticulous research, this volume reveals many new insights into Marville's personal and professional biography, including the central fact that he was born Charles-Franðcois Bossu. He shed this name and adoptedthe pseudonym Marville when he began his career as an illustrator in the 1830s. With five essays by respected scholars, this book offers the first comprehensive examination of Marville's life and career and delivers the much-awaited public recognition his photographs so richly deserve"--. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Risk communicators often need to communicate probabilistic predictions. On occasion, an event with 10% likelihood will occur, or one with 90% likelihood will not – a probabilistically unexpected ou...

This is the first in a series of five papers on the role, remit and function of research ethics committees which are intended to provide for REC members a broad understanding of the most important issues in research ethics and governance. The first considers the rationale for having ethics review by committee at all; seeking to explain why ethics committees, as we currently have them, are so important to the wider system of governing research.

Merker, Williford, and Rudrauf make several arguments against the integrated information theory of consciousness; whereas some have merit, their conclusion that the theory should be discarded is premature. Coming years promise advances in the empirical study of consciousness, and only after theories are independently tested with shared data can they be ruled in or out. We propose future research directions.

Expectations of receiving personal health information as a fringe benefit of biospecimen donation—termed diagnostic misconception—are increasingly documented. We developed an instrument measuring conflation of observational biospecimen-based research and clinical care for use with Latino communities, who may be particularly affected by diagnostic misconception due to limited health care access.

Mastery imagery (i.e., images of being in control and coping in difficult situations) is used to regulate anxiety. The ability to image this content is associated with trait confidence and anxiety, but research examining mastery imagery ability's association with confidence and anxiety in response to a stressful event is scant. The present study examined whether trait mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and anxiety, and the subsequent associations on performance in response to an acute psychological stress. Participants (N= (...) 130; 55% male;Mage= 19.94 years;SD= 1.07 years) completed assessments of mastery imagery ability and engaged in a standardized acute psychological stress task. Immediately prior to the task, confidence, cognitive and somatic anxiety intensity, and interpretation of anxiety symptoms regarding the task were assessed. Path analyses supported a model whereby mastery imagery ability mediated the relationship between confidence and cognitive and somatic anxiety interpretation. Greater mastery imagery ability and confidence were both directly associated with better performance on the stress task. Mastery imagery ability may help individuals experience more facilitative anxiety and perform better during stressful tasks. Improving mastery imagery ability by enhancing self-confidence may help individuals successfully cope with anxiety elicited during stressful situations. (shrink)

Examined as an isolated situation, and through the lens of a rare and feared disease, Mr. Duncan's case seems ripe for second-guessing the physicians and nurses who cared for him. But viewed from the perspective of what we know about errors and team communication, his case is all too common. Nearly 440,000 patient deaths in the U.S. each year may be attributable to medical errors. Breakdowns in communication among health care teams contribute in the majority of these errors. The culture (...) of health care does not seem to foster functional, effective communication between and among professionals. Why? And more importantly, why do we not do something about it? (shrink)

Law contains many dualities, though most, if not all, of these dualities resolve into one complex puzzle: To what extent is law a matter of pure social facts, or moral value untethered to social facts? I argue that each concept of law reconciles this duality in a different way on the basis of certain beneficial consequences that might result. Instead of pitting concepts against one another universally, we should accept that the balance between law's social fact and moral value dimensions (...) is context-specific in relation to particular legal puzzles. This balance can be achieved only by considering both political theory and empirical data. (shrink)

Artificial insemination was the first conceptive technology to be widely used in agriculture. Whereas at the beginning of the twentieth century all cows in England and Wales were mated to bulls, by the end of the 1950s 60% conceived through artificial insemination. By then a national network of ‘cattle breeding centres’ brought AI within the reach of every farmer. In this paper I explore how artificial insemination, which had few supporters in the 1920s and 1930s, was transformed into an ‘indispensable’ (...) method for reproducing cattle. I discuss the factors that made organised AI possible , including changes in cultures of cattle breeding, novel State involvement in bovine reproduction, the rise of new ‘animal breeding research’ centres at Cambridge, Edinburgh and Reading universities, war preparations and central planning by the Milk Marketing Board . I go on to show that the unprecedented focus on bovine reproduction set in motion by the AI centres effectively generated new networks of reproductive research, through these the ‘biopower’ of the farm was incorporated into the clinic. The example of AI shows that by combining the history of reproductive technology in agriculture and medicine we can give a richer account of modern reproduction. (shrink)

This article examines the emergent relationship between epistemic responsibility and frame awareness in early childhood, wherein a mother uses language socialization practices to guide her child into a new frame. The pair co-constructs the parameters of the new frame through negotiation of epistemic responsibility and remedial interchanges. The analysis demonstrates that these remedial interchanges arise from conflicting understandings of the embeddedness of frames and the epistemic dynamics that these frames entail. The child maintains epistemic primacy in her concurrent play frame, (...) which carries over to the recording activity given that the recording activity is embedded within her larger play frame. I argue that the data predict epistemic responsibility to be acquired earlier than the ability to shift epistemic dynamics outside of role-play. This study contributes to our understanding of frame and epistemic development in early childhood. (shrink)

This paper raises three questions about Shiffman’s thesis that Plutarch is offering a distinctive “hermeneutical philosophy” that verifies the truth of central Platonic doctrines.

Este trabalho tem como objetivo apresentar as características gerais da pesquisa em Educação Física no Estado de Sergipe, a partir das dissertações e teses dos docentes que atuam nos cursos de Educação Física das instituições públicas e privadas de Ensino Superior. Os dados iniciais do balanço apontam que existe uma variabilidade de modelos teórico-metodológicos e um número considerável de docentes que não realizaram seu mestrado e/ou doutorado na área de Educação Física, mas em outras áreas do conhecimento, e em alguns (...) casos inclusive, em instituições estrangeiras e do eixo sul-sudeste do Brasil. (shrink)

Benjamin Mays's The Negro's God as Reflected in His Literature outlined a tradition of African American God-talk from the eighteenth century. Mays identified a black social Christianity, what he called "the ethical approach," that recognized why oppressed people "emphasize the justice of God." In doing so, he hoped the book would motivate a new kind of politically informed black religious leadership. In the midst of writing The Negro's God, Mays traveled to India. This essay examines how the Indian independence movement (...) and meeting Gandhi motivated and gave meaning to Mays's work. (shrink)