Jay Asher’s novel Thirteen Reasons Why and its Netflix adaptation have enjoyed widespread popularity. While they draw needed attention to issues like bullying and teen estrangement, they may have an unintended effect: they mislead about the etiology of suicide and even glamorize it to a degree. The medical literature has shown that suicide is almost always the result of psychiatric disorder, not provocative stress, in much the same way an asthmatic crisis is primarily the result of an underlying medical condition, (...) not an allergic stimulus. Both the novel and Netflix series ignore this premise and even belittle the idea. Thus, while the story has artistic merits, it also has the potential to be destructive if accessed by young readers and viewers seeking guidance. Approximately ten percent of teens suffer from depression, and suicide recently surpassed homicide as the second-leading cause of death among persons ages ten to twenty-four in the United States. A more balanced view addressing these misconceptions is provided for teens, parents, and mental health professionals. (shrink)

Evolutionary theory makes further predictions about conflict. It predicts sex differences in the proclivity to attack and defend. It further suggests complementary biases in what we expect of the sexes. Finally, it suggests that the forms of human facial expressions of anger and happiness may have coevolved with the regularity of conflict as a means of signaling, bluffing, and defusing attack.

As Part of the Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act of 1990, the Patient Self Determination Act legislates new responsibilites for healthcare facilities. The authors served as members of the California Consortium on Patient Self-Determination, and the materials produced by this group offer healthcare facilities a valuable guide for implementing the PSDA. The ACt follows a historical trend led by doctrines of informed consent and increasing patient autonomy regarding rights to accept or refuse medical treatment and to execute advance directives. The requirements (...) of the Act will influence healthcare facilities and how they communicate with patients about advance directives. Although the Act seeks to increase awareness of advance directices among all participants in healthcare interactions, it could pose major stumbling blocks to providing sensitive and humane care if certain concerns are nor addressed adequatley. The benefits of the Act could be far reaching and substantial for patients and healthcare facilities alike. (shrink)

What determines whether an action is right or wrong? Morality, Rules, and Consequences: A Critical Reader explores for students and researchers the relationship between consequentialist theory and moral rules. Most of the chapters focus on rule consequentialism or on the distinction between act and rule versions of consequentialism. Contributors, among them the leading philosophers in the discipline, suggest ways of assessing whether rule consequentialism could be a satisfactory moral theory. These essays, all of which are previously unpublished, provide students in (...) moral philosophy with essential material and ask key questions on just what the criteria for an adequate moral theory might be. (shrink)

In response to the many changes currently going on in health care, this book offers the combined insight and wisdom of a stellar group of scholars and professionals with extensive experience in the health care field. The book opens with a look at people's actual experience of health care today, from four different perspectives. It then addresses foundational questions, including the nature of medicine, nursing, and justice. Surveyed next are the changing economics of health care as well as the impact (...) of these changes on such areas as mental health care, long-term care, health care for minorities, and legal malpractice. The closing section of the book assesses from a Christian perspective available constructive alternatives, including creative funding strategies with special attention to the needs of poor persons, physician unions, and the use of "alternative medicine" therapies. (shrink)

K. T. Fann, Ludwig Wittgenstein: the man and his philosophy. New Jersey, Humanities Press; Sussex, Harvester Press: 1967. 415 pp. 10.50.Gerd Brand, The central texts of Ludwig Wittgenstein. Translated and with an introduction by Robert E. Innis. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1979. xxv + 182 pp. £ 10.00 /£3.95.Joseph Warren Dauben. Georg Cantor: his mathematics and philosophy of the infinite. Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 1979. xiii + 404 pp., 4 plts. $25 US.S. Poggi, I sistemi dell'esperienza. Psicologia, logica (...) e teoria della scienza da Kant a Wundt. Bologna: il Mulino, 1977.679 pp., Lit. 12.000.Raymond Bradley and Norman Swartz, Possible Worlds. An introduction to logic and its philosophy. Indianapolis and New York; Hackett Publishing Company: Oxford; Blackwell: 1979. xxi + 391 pp. £15.00 /£4.95.S. Haack, Philosophy of logics. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978. xiv + 276 pp. £ 13.50.F. J. Pelletier, Mass terms: some philosophicalproblems. Dordrecht, Boston and London: Reidel, 1979. xiii + 303 pp. Dfl. 70/$34.00.Theo A. F. Kuipers, Studies in inductive probability and rational expectation. Dordrecht, Holland and Boston, USA.: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1978. xii + 145 pp. Dfl. 50/$22.50. (shrink)

For a long time, regularity accounts of causation have virtually vanished from the scene. Problems encountered within other theoretical frameworks have recently induced authors working on causation, laws of nature, or methodologies of causal reasoning – as e.g. May (Kausales Schliessen. Eine Untersuchung über kausale Erklärungen und Theorienbildung. Ph.D. thesis, Universität Hamburg, Hamburg, 1999), Ragin (Fuzzy-set social science. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), Graßhoff and May (Causal regularities. In W. Spohn, M. Ledwig, & M. Esfeld (Eds.), Current issues in (...) causation (pp. 85–114). Paderborn: Mentis, 2001), Swartz (The concept of physical law (2nd ed.). http://www.sfu.ca/philosophy/physical-law/, 2003), Halpin (Erkenntnis, 58, 137–168, 2003) – to direct their attention back to regularity theoretic analyses. In light of the latest proposals of regularity theories, the paper at hand therefore reassesses the criticism raised against regularity accounts since the INUS theory of causation of Mackie (The cement of the universe. A study of causation. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). It is shown that most of these objections target strikingly over-simplified regularity theoretic sketches. By outlining ways to refute these objections it is argued that the prevalent conviction as to the overall failure of regularity theories has been hasty. (shrink)

In this paper I seek to answer two interrelated questions about pleasures and pains: (i) The question of unity: Do all pleasures share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pleasures, and do all pains share a single quality that accounts for why these, and only these, are pains? (ii) The question of commensurability: Are all pleasures and pains rankable on a single, quantitative hedonic scale? I argue that our intuitions draw us in opposing directions: (...) On the one hand, pleasures and pains seem unified and commensurable; on the other hand, they do not. I further argue that neither intuition can be abandoned, and examine three different paths to reconciliation. The first two are response theory and split experience theory. Both of these, I argue, are unsuccessful. A third path, however—which I label “dimensionalism” —succeeds. Dimensionalism is the theory that pleasure and pain have the ontological status as opposite sides of a hedonic dimension along which experiences vary. This view has earlier been suggested by C. D. Broad, Karl Duncker, Shelly Kagan, and John Searle, but it has not been worked out in detail. In this paper I work out the dimensionalist view in some detail, defend it, and explain how it solves the problem of the unity and commensurability of pleasures and pains. (shrink)

Joel Feinberg : In Memoriam. Preface. Part I: INTRODUCTION TO THE NATURE AND VALUE OF PHILOSOPHY. 1. Joel Feinberg: A Logic Lesson. 2. Plato: "Apology." 3. Bertrand Russell: The Value of Philosophy. PART II: REASON AND RELIGIOUS BELIEF. 1. The Existence and Nature of God. 1.1 Anselm of Canterbury: The Ontological Argument, from Proslogion. 1.2 Gaunilo of Marmoutiers: On Behalf of the Fool. 1.3 L. Rowe: The Ontological Argument. 1.4 Saint Thomas Aquinas: The Five Ways, from Summa Theologica. 1.5 Samuel (...) Clarke: A Modern Formulation of the Cosmological Argument. 1.6 William L. Rowe: The Cosmological Argument. 1.7 William Paley: The Argument from Design. 1.8 Michael Ruse: The Design Argument. 1.9 David Hume: Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion. 2. The Problem of Evil. 2.1 Fyodor Dostoyevsky: Rebellion. 2.2 J. L. Mackie: Evil and Omnipotence. 2.3 Peter van Inwagen: The Argument from Evil. 2.4 Michael Murray and Michael Rea: The Argument from Evil. 2.5 B. C. Johnson: God and the Problem of Evil. 3. Reason and Faith. 3.1 W. K. Clifford: The Ethics of Belief. 3.2 William James: The Will to Believe. 3.3 Kelly James Clark: Without Evidence or Argument. 3.4 Blaise Pascal: The Wager. 3.5 Lawrence Shapiro: Miracles and Justification. 3.6 Simon Blackburn: Infini-Rien. Part III. HUMAN KNOWLEDGE: ITS GROUNDS AND LIMITS. 1. Skepticism. 1.1 John Pollock: A Brain in a Vat. 1.2 Michael Huemer: Three Skeptical Arguments. 1.3 Robert Audi: Skepticism. 2. The Nature and Value of Knowledge. 2.1 Plato: Knowledge as Justified True Belief. 2.2 Edmund Gettier: Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? 2.3 James Cornman, Keith Lehrer, and George Pappas: An Analysis of Knowledge. 2.4 Gilbert Ryle: Knowing How and Knowing That. 2.5 Plato: "Meno". 2.6 Linda Zagzebski, Epistemic Good and The Good Life. 3. Our Knowledge of the External World. 3.1 Bertrand Russell: Appearance and Reality and the Existence of Matter. 3.2 René Descartes: Meditations on First Philosophy. 3.3 John Locke: The Causal Theory of Perception. 3.4 George Berkeley: Of the Principles of Human Knowledge. 3.5 G. E. Moore: Proof of an External World. 4. The Methods of Science. 4.1 David Hume: An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding. 4.2 Wesley C. Salmon: An Encounter with David Hume. 4.3 Karl Popper: Science: Conjectures and Refutations. 4.4 Philip Kitcher: Believing Where We Cannot Prove. Part IV: MIND AND ITS PLACE IN NATURE. 1. The Mind-Body Problem. 1.1 Brie Gertler: In Defense of Mind--Body Dualism. 1.2 Frank Jackson: The Qualia Problem. 1.3 David Papineau: The Case for Materialism. 1.4 Paul Churchland: Functionalism and Eliminative Materialism. 2. Can Non-Humans Think? 2.1 Alan Turing: Computing Machinery and Intelligence. 2.2 John R. Searle: Minds, Brains, and Programs. 2.3 William G. Lycan: Robots and Minds. 3. Personal Identity and the Survival of Death. 3.1 John Locke: The Prince and the Cobbler. 3.2 Thomas Reid: Of Mr. Locke’s Account of Our Personal Identity. 3.3 David Hume: The Self. 3.4 Derek Parfit: Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons. 3.5 Shelly Kagan: What Matters. 3.6 John Perry: A Dialogue on Personal Identity and Immortality. Part V: DETERMINISM, FREE WILL, AND RESPONSIBILITY. 1. Libertarianism: The Case for Free Will and Its Incompatibility with Determinism. 1.1 Roderick M. Chisholm: Human Freedom and the Self. 1.2 Robert Kane: Free Will: Ancient Dispute, New Themes. 2. Hard Determinism: The Case for Determinism and its Incompatibility with Its Incompatibility with Any Important Sense of Free Will. 2.1 James Rachels: The case against Free Will. 2.2 Derk Pereboom: Why We Have No Free Will and Can Live Without It. 3. Compatibilism: The Case for Determinism and Its Compatibility with the Most Important Sense of Free Will. 3.1 David Hume: Of Liberty and Necessity. 3.2 Helen Beebee: Compatibilism and the Ability to do Otherwise. 4. Freedom and Moral Responsibility. 4.1 Galen Strawson: Luck Swallows Everything. 4.2 Harry Frankfurt: Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility. 4.3 Thomas Nagel: Moral Luck. 4.4 Susan Wolf: Sanity and the Metaphysics of Responsibility. Part VI: MORALITY AND ITS CRITICS. 1. Changes to Morality. 1.1 Joel Feinberg: Psychological Egoism. 1.2 Plato: The Immoralist’s Challenge. 1.3 Friedrich Nietzche: Master and Slave Morality. 1.4 Richard Joyce: The Evolutionary Debunking of Morality. 2. Proposed Standards and Right of Conduct. 2.1 Russ Shafer-Landau: Ethical Subjectivism. 2.2 Mary Midgley: Trying Out One’s New Sword. 2.3 Aristotle: Virtue and the Good Life. 2.4 Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. 2.5 Plato: Euthyphro. 2.6 Immanuel Kant: The Good Will and the Categorical Imperative. 2.7 J.S. Mill: Utilitarianism, Chapters 2 and 4. 2.8 W. D. Ross: What Makes Right Acts Right? 2.9 Hilde Lindemann: What Is Feminist Ethics? 3. Ethical Problems. 3.1 Kwame Anthony Appiah: What Will Future Generations Condemn Us For? 3.2 Peter Singer: Famine, Affluence and Morality. 3.3 John Harris: The Survival Lottery. 3.4 James Rachels: Active and Passive Euthanasia. 3.5 Mary Anne Warren: The Moral and Legal Status of Abortion. 3.6 Don Marquis: Why Abortion Is Immoral. 4. The Meaning of Life. 4.1 Epicurus: Letter to Menoeceus. 4.2 Richard Taylor: The Meaning of Life. 4.3 Richard Kraut: Desire and the Human Good. 4.4 Leo Tolstoy: My Confession. 4.5 Susan Wolf: Happiness and Meaning. 4.6 Thomas Nagel: The Absurd. (shrink)

In the beginning was an aborted word. The first example of a woman’s literary criticism in Western tradition, or more accurately the first miscarriage of a woman’s criticism, occurs early in the Odyssey. High in her room above the hall of suitors, Penelope can hear a famous minstrel sing that most painful of stories, the Greek homecoming from Troy—significantly, the matter of the Odyssey itself. That is no song for a woman. She comes down the stairs to protest. “Phêmios, other (...) spells you know, high deeds of gods and heroes, as the poets tell them; let these men hear some other, while they sit silent and drink their wine. But sing no more this bitter tale that wears my heart away. It opens in me again the wound of longing For one incomparable, ever in my mind— His fame all Hellas knows, and midland Argos.”It seems a reasonable request. But her words meet an immediate brutal rebuff from an unexpected source: her own son Telemachus. “Mother, why do you grudge our own dear minstrel Joy of song, wherever his thought may lead? Poets are not to blame, but Zeuswho gives what fate he pleases to adventurous men.Here is no reason for reproof: to singthe news of the Danaans! Men like besta song that rings like morning on the ear.But you must nerve yourself and try to listen.Odysseus was not the only one at Troynever to know the day of his homecoming.Others, how many others, lost their lives!”9Men like to hear the news; women must learn not to take songs so personally! And Penelope gives in. Marveling at the wisdom of her son, she goes back to her room and cries herself to sleep.Telemachus’ words do not seem very much to the point. Penelope had not asked Phêmios to stop singing, after all, or to sing something fit for women; she only asked him to choose some other adventure. And to reproach her for not considering that others besides Odysseus had failed to come home seems irrelevant as well as cruel. The fact that others feel pain is hardly a reason for her not to feel it. Penelope cannot bear even to name her husband, but Telemachus seems to take pleasure in saying “Odysseus.” By proclaiming his own indifference to pain, he argues just like a man. And that, of course, is the point. The scene has been contrived exactly to show his new maturity. He proves himself no longer a boy in the time-honored fashion, by rejecting any tenderness of heart and by putting down a woman. Henceforth he will be equal to the suitors. Lawrence Lipking is Chester D. Tripp Professor of Humanities at Northwestern University and director of the program in comparative literature and theory. He is the author of The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England and The Life of the Poet, which won the Christian Gauss Award of Phi Beta Kappa in 1982. His previous contributions to Critical Inquiry are “The Marginal Glass” and “Arguing with Shelly” . The present essay was originally given as a lecture at the School of Criticism and Theory in the summer of 1982. It is part of a book, Abandoned Women and Poetic Tradition, which is to appear in 1984. (shrink)

This article is a preliminary presentation of conjunctive paraconsistency, the claim that there might be non-explosive true contradictions, but contradictory propositions cannot be considered separately true. In case of true ‘p and not p’, the conjuncts must be held untrue, Simplification fails. The conjunctive approach is dual to non-adjunctive conceptions of inconsistency, informed by the idea that there might be cases in which a proposition is true and its negation is true too, but the conjunction is untrue, Adjunction fails. While (...) non-adjunctivism is a well-known option, the other view is not so much studied nowadays, but it was not unknown in the tradition, and there are some positive suggestions, in recent literature, that the position is plausible and deserves to be developed. The article compares conjunctivism, non-adjunctivism and dialetheism, then focuses on some possible justifications, costs and benefits of the conjunctive view. (shrink)

This book is a critical examination of the philosophical and moral issues in relation to human enhancement and the various related medical developments that are now rapidly moving from the laboratory into the clinical realm. In the book, the author critically examines technologies such as genetic engineering, neural implants, pharmacologic enhancement, and cryonic suspension from transhumanist and bioconservative positions, focusing primarily on moral issues and what it means to be a human in a setting where technological interventions sometimes impact strongly (...) on our humanity. The author also introduces the notion that death is a process rather than an event, as well as identifies philosophical and clinical limitations in the contemporary determination of brain death as a precursor to organ procurement for transplantation. The discussion on what exactly it means to be dead is later applied to explore philosophical and clinical issues germane to the cryonics movement. Written by a physician/ scientist and heavily referenced to the peer-reviewed medical and scientific literature, the book is aimed at advanced students and academics but should be readable by any intelligent reader willing to carry out some side-reading. No prior knowledge of moral philosophy is assumed, as the various key approaches to moral philosophy are outlined early in the book. (shrink)

Consider the expansion TS of a theory T by a predicate for a submodel of a reduct T0 of T. We present a setup in which this expansion admits a model companion TS. We show that some of the nice feat...

Psychiatry is increasingly dominated by the reductionist claim that mental illness is caused by neurobiological abnormalities such as chemical imbalances in the brain. Critical psychiatry does not believe that this is the whole story and proposes a more ethical foundation for practice. This book describes an original framework for renewing mental health services in alliance with people with mental health problems. It is an advance over the polarization created by the "anti-psychiatry" of the past.

Engaging Polanyi’s embeddedness–disembeddedness framework, this study explored the work experiences of Bhil children employed in Indian Bt cottonseed GPNs. The innovative visual technique of drawings followed by interviews was used. Migrant children, working under debt bondage, underwent greater exploitation and perennial and severe depersonalized bullying, indicative of commodification of labour and disembeddedness. In contrast, children working in their home villages were not under debt bondage and underwent less exploitation and occasional and mild depersonalized bullying, indicative of how civil society organizations, (...) along with the state, attempt to re-embed economic activities in the social context. Polanyi’s double movement was evident. ‘Place’ emerged as the pivotal factor determining children’s experiences. A ‘protective alliance’ of community controls and social power, associated with in-group affiliations and cohesive ties, stemming from a common village and tribal identity, aided children working at home for Bhil farmers. ‘Asymmetric intergroup inequality’ due to pronounced social identity and class differences, coupled with locational constraints and developmental disadvantage, made migrant children vulnerable targets. Social embeddedness influences how child workers are treated because it forces employers to be ethical and not engage in bullying. However, by shifting production to children’s home villages, there is an attempt to obscure the difference between child labour and child work. Thus, the seeds of disembeddedness are sown through the very act of re-embeddeding, potentially hampering future interventions. (shrink)

This book provides both a short history of Christian ethics and looks at itsbasic sources as they arise from Judaism, Greco-Roman ethics, andChristianity.

Part of the work for this paper was done during the tenure of a fellowship at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences. I am grateful for financial support provided by the National Science Foundation, Grant #BNS-8011494, and for the assistance of the staff of the Center. I also want to thank David Bloor, Stephen Downes, David Hull and Andy Pickering for offering good advice and criticism, some of which I have heeded.

In making the case that “rationalization is rational,” Cushman downplays its signature liability: Rationalization exposes a person to the hazard of delusion and self-sabotage. In paradigm cases, rationalization undermines instrumental rationality by introducing inaccuracies into the representational map required for planning and effective agency.

At the beginning of his influential De Nominum Analogia, Thomas de Vio Cajetan mentions three mistaken positions on analogy. He does not attach names to these positions, but each one was held by distinguished Thomists of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Furthermore, their proponents were responding to the same set of challenges from John Duns Scotus that set the agenda for the De Nominum Analogia. In this paper, I would like to do something that Cajetan did not do, and that (...) is, directly consider the merits of the first position in his list of mistaken accounts of analogy; namely, the position that analogy is constituted by disjunction. More specifically, this paper investigates the polemical use for which Hervaeus Natalis deployed analogy of disjunction; the reply of John Duns Scotus; and the implications of this back and forth for understanding the Thomist-Scotist dispute over the concept of being. (shrink)

Although it is frequently overlooked, J.S. Mill's political philosophy has a significant civic component; he is a committed believer in the value of active and disinterested participation in public affairs by the citizens of liberal democracies, and he advocates a programme of civic education intended to cultivate public spirit. In the first half of this essay I present a brief but systematic exploration of his thought's civic dimension. In the second half I defend Mill's civic liberalism against various critics who (...) have explicitly or implicitly charged that the civic and liberal components of his political philosophy are inconsistent. (shrink)