Cognitive‐enhancing drugs are prescribed to patients with psychiatric disorders, such as attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) and Alzheimer's disease, to treat cognitive deficits. This chapter discusses the use of pharmacological agents to improve the cognition of both those with cognitive impairments and of the general population, as well as some of the benefits, risks, and ethical issues associated with the use of cognitive‐enhancing drugs. The chapter also talks about a survey run by the journal Nature, which was prompted by a (...) commentary by the authors of this chapter, that asked readers for their views on the issues surrounding cognitive enhancement. It can be seen that the ethical issues surrounding the use of cognitive‐enhancing drugs are complex and require discussion among different groups. With the development of new drugs and methods of enhancing cognition, such as brain stimulation, the need for further research and discussion is likely to become more pressing. (shrink)

Pharmacological substances used to improve cognition and brain function range from dietary supplements and caffeine to drugs targeted at altering particular neurochemical concentrations in the brain. This article considers current scientific research into pharmaceutical cognitive enhancement and likely future directions. Then it discusses the trends in the use of PCEs within patients groups for whom they were intended, as well as in those for whom they were not originally intended, including healthy adults and children. Finally, it provides an overview of (...) current and future ethical considerations and concludes that the use of PCE will likely continue both within patient and healthy individuals in the foreseeable future. Information regarding actual use, benefits, and harms in various populations is severely lacking. Therefore, more emphasis should be placed on obtaining the relevant empirical data, for example, by the long-term monitoring of effectiveness and side effects, and by accurate large-scale surveys to assess actual usage. (shrink)

The Sickness unto Death is commonly regarded as one of Kierkegaard's most important works – but also as one of his most difficult texts to understand. It is a meditation on Christian existentialist themes including sin, despair, religious faith and its redemptive power, and the relation and difference between physical and spiritual death. This volume of new essays guides readers through the philosophical and theological significance of the work, while clarifying the complicated ideas that Kierkegaard develops. Some of the essays (...) focus closely on particular themes, others attempt to elucidate the text as a whole, and yet others examine it in relation to other philosophical views. Bringing together these diverse approaches, the volume offers a comprehensive understanding of this pivotal work. It will be of interest to those studying Kierkegaard as well as existentialism, religious philosophy, and moral psychology. (shrink)

We argue that psychological research can enhance the identification of reasoning errors and the development of an appropriate pedagogy to instruct people in how to avoid these errors. In this paper we identify some of the findings of psychologists that help explain some common fallacies, give examples of fallacies identified in the research that have not been typically identified in philosophy, and explore ways in which this research can enhance critical thinking instruction.

The dialectical approach to teaching critical thinking is centred on a comparative evaluation of contending arguments, so that generally the strength of an argument for a position can only be assessed in the context of this dialectic. The identification of fallacies, though important, plays only a preliminary role in the evaluation to individual arguments. Our approach to fallacy identification and analysis sees fallacies as argument patterns whose persuasive power is disproportionate to their probative value.

The authors explore how urban versus rural community location shapes the extent to which various individual, relational, and structural factors affect the gender gap in small business success. Building on previous research on gender and small business success, gender queuing theories, and gendered organization/institution theories, they develop a place-specific theory of the gender gap in small business success. The findings, based on small business data collected in urban and rural Iowa, support queuing arguments and raise questions about the effectiveness of (...) crowded-sector explanations. They indicate that the gender gap in small business success operates such that men-owned businesses are more successful in both urban and rural settings but that men-owned businesses are even more successful than women-owned businesses in urban than rural communities. The authors discuss the causes and consequences of the gender gap in small business success in rural and urban places and identify key issues for further research. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kant's concept of cosmopolitan right is the philosophical basis for contemporary international human rights. The law of world citizenship or cosmopolitan right is necessary in order to secure hospitable interactions between individuals and states. Such interactions in turn create an international civil culture or "cosmopolitan condition" which 1 is the source of the further specification and eventual codification of human rights. Human rights, I conclude, are universal because of their international significance and scope and (...) are inherently linked to cosmopolitan values. (shrink)

This book's importance is derived from three sources: careful conceptualization of teacher induction from historical, methodological, and international perspectives; systematic reviews of research literature relevant to various aspects of teacher induction including its social, cultural, and political contexts, program components and forms, and the range of its effects; substantial empirical studies on the important issues of teacher induction with different kinds of methodologies that exemplify future directions and approaches to the research in teacher induction.

Some researchers interested in assessing moral reasoning among business practitioners or students have developed their own vignettes or scenarios set in business contexts, based on assumptions that the situations presented in the often-used Defining Issues Test (DIT) will somehow be inappropriate for these specific types of respondents. This paper is the first to examine in depth both the actual details contained in these business-oriented scenarios and empirical findings emerging from them. Among this paper’s conclusions are: (1) assumptions underpinning the presumed (...) superiority of business-oriented vignettes have yet to be tested; (2) the DIT possesses considerable advantages unavailable in alternative measures; (3) many business-oriented scenarios have underlying Dilemma themes that seem inherently ambiguous and thus of questionable relevance for assessing moral reasoning; (4) these scenarios have no obvious equivalent in the DIT and thus cannot definitively be placed under the umbrella of the latter’s demonstrated construct validity; and (5) meaningful empirical findings have not clearly emerged from investigations using business-oriented vignettes. In light of these conclusions, we recommend that investigators interested in moral reasoning advance knowledge in a coherent and unified way by using the DIT that seems entirely appropriate for use among respondents with business experience or training. Although alternative measures may have value for assessing ethical judgments, evidence of their validity as a measure of moral reasoning is lacking. (shrink)

Contemporary realist theories of value claim to be compatible with natural science. In this paper, I call this claim into question by arguing that Darwinian considerations pose a dilemma for these theories. The main thrust of my argument is this. Evolutionary forces have played a tremendous role in shaping the content of human evaluative attitudes. The challenge for realist theories of value is to explain the relation between these evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes, on the one hand, and the (...) independent evaluative truths that realism posits, on the other. Realism, I argue, can give no satisfactory account of this relation. On the one hand, the realist may claim that there is no relation between evolutionary influences on our evaluative attitudes and independent evaluative truths. But this claim leads to the implausible skeptical result that most of our evaluative judgements are off track due to the distorting pressure of Darwinian forces. The realist’s other option is to claim that there is a relation between evolutionary influences and independent evaluative truths, namely that natural selection favored ancestors who were able to grasp those truths. But this account, I argue, is unacceptable on scientific grounds. Either way, then, realist theories of value prove unable to accommodate the fact that Darwinian forces have deeply influenced the content of human values. After responding to three objections, the third of which leads me to argue against a realist understanding of the disvalue of pain, I conclude by sketching how antirealism is able to sidestep the dilemma I have presented. Antirealist theories of value are able to offer an alternative account of the relation between evolutionary forces and evaluative facts —
an account that allows us to reconcile our understanding of evaluative truth with our understanding of the many non-rational causes that have played a role in shaping our evaluative judgements. (shrink)

By way of attempting to explain comic pleasure, this paper proposes an outline for an inclusive theory of comedy — ‘inclusive’ in the sense of amalgamating various past contributions that tend to be thought of as mutually exclusive. More specifically, this essay will (a) propose a teleological definition of comedy, (b) integrate seemingly competing accounts of laughter into a relatively unified explanation, (c) clarify the connection between laughter and comedy, (d) defend a flexible ontology of comic response that enables the (...) coexistence of genuinely competing paradigms of the mind (which, in turn, underlie seemingly competing theories of comic reception), and (e) will suggest how comic pleasure forms an indispensable addition to a theory of comedy. (shrink)

In this article I attempt to present an explanation that integrates the five features needed for the cognitive (knowledge‐yielding) linking of philosophy and literature. These features are, first, explaining how a literary work can support a general claim. Second, explaining what is uniquely gained through concentrating on such support patterns as they appear in aesthetic contexts in particular. Third, explaining how features of aesthetic response are connected with knowledge. Four, maintaining a distinction between manipulation and adequate persuasion. Five, achieving all (...) this without invoking what David Novitz has called “a shamelessly functional and didactic view of literature.”. (shrink)

This response to “Morality or Moralism?” by Emilie Hache and Bruno Latour takes issue with their distinction between two kinds of morality. Hache and Latour see a difference between morality as sensitivity and morality as principled claims regarding moral considerability. They then argue for form-content contradiction/harmony between these purportedly opposing senses. In responding, Zamir argues that these operations can be construed as distinct kinds of sensitivity. Arguments that advocate bringing nonhuman animals into moral consideration can be abstract and general. (...) But this does not mean that such arguments or those who make them are insensitive. Some kinds of sensitivity are attuned to general facts rather than to particulars. Hache and Latour thus err by reducing moral sensitivity to a response to particulars, which leads them to perceive form-content tensions where these do not exist. Zamir's response also argues against a tendency in posthumanist animal ethics—a tendency shared by Hache and Latour's article—to refuse descending to discuss the actual practical questions regarding animals that Anglo-American animal ethics explores. Zamir examines (and rejects) some possible posthumanist arguments that might support remaining philosophically uninvolved in these discussions. (shrink)

I attempt to explain Plato's choice of dialogue through an analysis of what he regarded as the conditions of knowledge acquisition. I see the main contribution of the paper in exposing the way in which time and pain are, for Plato, conditions of knowledge acquisition. Plato endorsed the “learning through suffering,” or pathei mathos, convention, central to Greek drama, and did so not through theory but through the praxis some of the dialogues employ. This addition of experiential components to the (...) more cognitively oriented definitions of knowledge that Socrates uses complicates what these works may say about human knowledge. I analyze these tensions and the bearing they may have on the question of Plato's choice of dialogue, that is, on his rhetoric in practice. The requirements for actual persuasion, as Plato specifies them in the Seventh Letter,, are only partially met by the fictional scenes of argumentation and knowledge conveying that Plato presents. However, such scenes permit transcending some of the limitations of written, systematic, nonpersonal discourse. The presentation of such interactions to a real reader through dialogue turns into a mode of writing that is closer to meeting the demands of actual communication of knowledge – at least knowledge regarding what Plato envisaged as being the highest sort of epistemic communication. (shrink)

In his essay The Dynamic Analytics of Property Law, Professor Michael Heller describes and criticizes the familiar, current analytical tools of property theory and calls for the adoption of a more dynamic approach. In this comment, I shall address briefly two issues discussed in Heller's paper: his suggestion that we add a fourth type of property – "anticommons property" – to the well-known "property trilogy" of private property, commons property, and state property; and his critique of the "bundle of rights" (...) approach of the courts to the takings problem, which leads to excessive fragmentation of private property. The former issue nicely demonstrates the current tendency of scholars to argue against "too much private property." The latter illustrates the familiar, futile search of property scholars for an all-encompassing metaphor to describe and identify private property. (shrink)

BackgroundVideo-calls have proven to be useful for older care home residents in improving socialization and reducing loneliness. Nonetheless, to facilitate the acceptability and usability of a new technological intervention, especially among people with dementia, there is a need for user-led design improvements. The current study conducted focus groups with an embedded activity with older people to allow for a person-centered design of a video-call intervention.MethodsTwenty-eight residents across four care homes in the South West of England participated in focus groups to (...) aesthetically personalize and ‘dress-up’ the equipment used in a video-call intervention. Each care home was provided with a ‘Skype on Wheels’ device, a wheelable ‘chassis’ comprising an iPad or tablet for access to Skype, and a telephone handset. During the focus group, residents were encouraged to participate in an activity using colorful materials to ‘dress-up’ SoW. Comments before, during and after the ‘dress up’ activity were audio recorded. Framework analysis was used to analyze the focus group data.ResultsOlder people, including seven with dementia were able to interact with and implement design changes to SoW through aesthetic personalization. Themes arising from the data included estrangement, anthropomorphism, reminiscence, personalization, need for socialization versus fear of socialization and attitudes toward technology. After this brief exposure to SoW, residents expressed the likelihood of using video-calls for socialization in the future.ConclusionCare home residents enjoy engaging with new technologies when given the opportunity to interact with it, to personalize it and to understand its purpose. Low cost aesthetic personalization of technologies can improve their acceptability, usability, and implementation within complex care environments. (shrink)

This book assembles a team of leading literary scholars and philosophers to probe philosophical questions that assert themselves in Shakespeare's Hamlet, including issues about subjectivity, knowledge, sex, grief, and self-theatricalization.

I will argue that vegetarianism is a better regulative ideal and a better form of pro-animal strategic protest compared to veganism. I begin by arguing against veganism. I shall then turn to tentative veganism.

Abstract“Reading as if for Death” asks how people live in the face of imminent death by analyzing Nevil Shute’s 1957 novel On the Beach. The few critics who have commented on this novel have focused on its message about the dangers of nuclear weapons. This article argues that this middlebrow Australian bestseller, which has never gone out of print, is also an important contribution to the literature of death and dying. In its focus on characters who may well be dead (...) within a year but continue to plant gardens and learn shorthand, the novel departs from common views of everyday life as passive, static, and immanent, instead portraying it as centered around acts of repair and future-oriented planning. In contrast to representations of mortality that emphasize transcendence and enlightenment, On the Beach sympathetically conveys the combination of certainty and uncertainty that most of its characters endure in living their final days and depicts characters for whom denial, refusing to see what is, and delusion, believing in what is not, become forms of palliative care. (shrink)