Ernest Sosa has recently argued that the knowledge we get from instruments and the knowledge we get from testimony is similar in important ways. Most importantly, the justification that supports it is similar in kind – both instrumental justification and justification from testimony is to be understood in terms of reliability. I argue that Sosa’s theory is problematic. Specifically, I argue that we can take certain attitudes towards people that we cannot coherently take towards instruments. This, I argue, grounds a (...) distinction between the kind of justification that testimony can make available and the kind of justification that instruments can make available. The result is that reliability cannot provide a complete explanation of the justification that testimony makes available. (shrink)

Philosophers Friedrich Nietzsche and Ayn Rand are often identified as strong critics of altruism and arch advocates of egoism. In this essay, Stephen Hicks argues that Nietzsche and Rand have much in common in their critiques of altruism but almost nothing in common in their views on egoism.

Why should the subject of physics arise in a paper ostensibly concerned with cognitive science and evolutionary biology? If we were advocating a new physics of life and mind simply because we cannot devise an explanation of brain function within the framework of conventional physics, it would appear to reveal a fundamental flaw in the paradigm that we are discussing. If cognition is a biological process, and if biology is ultimately reducible to physics, should not physics be sufficient to entail (...) it? In fact, avoiding such an appearance of being “unscientific” motivates many brain scientists to find a way at all costs to couch their explanations of brain behavior in terms of the traditional concepts of physics. Curiously, they do so while failing to appreciate that the fundamental need for new physics is postulated not by the students of the processes of life and mind, but rather by some of the world’s most renowned physicists. In the present paper, I will use the expression “old physics” to include nineteenth century classical physics, general and special relativity, traditional quantum mechanics and chaotic dynamics. I subsume all of these under the umbrella of old physics because, in spite of their differences, they share a set of metaphysical presuppositions. I will argue that some of these suppositions are deeply flawed and that these flaws render old physics insufficient to portray reality coherently, and that abandoning these flawed concepts may provide new and viable theoretical foundations for both biology and cognitive science. (shrink)

Patient-centered care is now recognized as a clinical method and ideal model for patient – health professional relationships, and many definitions have influenced its evolution. Overall the patient-centered care literature has provided relatively little to define patient-centered care at the level of the patient-professional relationship. Additionally, patient-centered care lacks grounding in ethical theory. This thesis asserts that theoretical concepts from the ethics of care can provide a stronger conceptual basis for patient-centered care.This thesis begins with a critical interpretive review of (...) the patient-centered care literature, yielding 12 articles that previously introduced new theoretical and definitional work on patient-centered care and patient-centered communication. Six common themes and ideas were discovered, and include Engaging the Patient as a Whole Person, Recognizing and Responding to Emotions, Fostering a Therapeutic Alliance, Promoting an Exchange of Information, Sharing Decision Making, and Enabling Self-Management and Patient Navigation. These elements were then compared to key elements of the ethics of care. This thesis argues that feminists have good reason to consider care as a type of moral duty, and it describes how this duty functions. This thesis also argues that a duty to care is triggered when caregivers are presented with particular substantive forms of vulnerability. Specifically, this thesis argues that vulnerable subjects whose constitutive needs are at risk require particular moral obligations. The links between the ethics of care and patient-centered care are discussed, including how an ethics of care response ought to function in the health care context. Finally, the cases of J.J. and Makayla Sault, two aboriginal girls who refused chemotherapy in favour of traditional aboriginal healing practices, are analyzed. This thesis offers a short scoping review of the bioethics discourse surrounding these cases. A review of this discourse revealed several common themes, which included the peripheral importance of culture and history, the equating of best interests with survival, the supremacy of science-based medicine, and the impartial application of ethical principles. This thesis recommends that health care professionals apply an ethics of care approach to similar ethical dilemmas in the future, which involves shifting one's ethical focus to the central relationships of the case, understanding the unique perspective of the patient's narrative, and promoting a care-based rather than a justice-based approach to problem-solving. (shrink)

This book is an ethic of inclusion leading from gender and sexual difference through the social world of race and culture to the natural world.

Reexamines the good, tracing the history of the idea of truth as an ethical movement, and interpreting the good as nature's abundance, giving beauty and truth as gifts.

Sulla base del ms. Vat. Borg. 39 viene edita la quaestio I del Quodlibet IV. Nell'introduzione l'A. ricorda le posizioni espresse da Enrico di Gand, Duns Scoto, Gerardo da Bologna e Erveo Natale sul tema in questione. La posizione di Guido sull'analogia dell'essere, per quanto originale, si costituisce come una valida alternativa alla opinio communis rappresentata da Gerardo da Bologna, Erveo Natale e da molti altri autori attivi tra la fine del XIII sec. e gli inizi del XIV.

1. IntroductionIt is an increasingly accepted protocol to situate oneself discursively in order to approach a set of problems. This protocol, consolidated by Donna Haraway’s famous “situated knowledge,” is also evident in everyday Indigenous Australian practice.1 I begin, therefore, with my long association with the Goolarabooloo community in Broome, North-West Australia, and in particular with Paddy Roe, who started teaching me in the late 1970s. This text attempts to translate his sense of belonging to that territory, an attachment he had (...) to struggle to maintain, both in the face of ongoing destructive colonization and also in the face of other Aboriginal territorial claims. These collective attachments are therefore inflected by history—not just settler history, but Indigenous history that has changed in relation to colonization. These changes are wrought through overwhelmingly rapid material changes, shifting institutional alliances, contested concepts, and new practices. This ethnographic history is an attempt to provide an overview of some of these changes in the North-West corner of Australia over the last forty years. (shrink)

This article argues that the concept of translation is central to the work of Bruno Latour, starting before ANT, with the group working on the sociologie de la traduction at the École des Mines. As one of his translators, I reflect on the extension of his identity via translation, then on the idea of translation as ‘political labour’ across social discontinuities, including those in colonisation contexts where certain languages can become hegemonic. Finally, with Latour’s major project, the Inquiry into Modes (...) of Existence, translation continues its descriptive task, but carries so much weight over the various modes of existence that it qualifies as a key philosophical concept of considerable analytic value. (shrink)

This article demonstrates the distortion of concepts involved in davidson's identification of linguistic understanding with interpretation. It suggests that the motivation for this distortion lies in davidson's commitment to a quinean metaphysics, In which human beings encounter bare sounds and bodily movements rather than words and actions. The affinities between this picture and that of empiricism are briefly adumbrated.

(1995). Re-Monstrations: Heidegger, Derrida and Wittgenstein's Hand. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 26, Lacan, Adorno, and Bataille, pp. 65-85.

I defend the idea that the fact that no system is entirely isolated can be used to explain the successful use of the microcanonical distribution in statistical mechanics. The argument turns on claims about what is needed for an adequate explanation of this fact: I argue in particular that various competing explanations do not meet reasonable conditions of adequacy, and that the most striking lacuna in Interventionism – its failure to explain the ‘arrow of time’ – is no real defect.

Marshalling psychological and sociological theory and research, and drawing upon extensive clinical experiences as a psychiatrist and psychotherapist, the author explores the various dimensions of cloning. Clone Being attempts to anticipate possible consequences for a clone, his or her 'parents' and family, and society.

Bosnian translation of "How 'Chinese' Was Kant?" (abridged version).

This article attempts to articulate an understanding of the Augustinian value of Caritas as a call for Augustinian Institutions of Higher Education to promote justice and equity in the world. The author grounds this definition of Caritas by incorporating three primary concepts of Catholic Social Teaching: the dignity of the human person, concern for the common good and a preferential option for the poor and marginalized in society. The article attempts to apply this definition of the value of Augustinian Caritas (...) to the ways in which a concern for social justice and equity is promoted and practiced in an undergraduate teacher preparation program in an Augustinian educational institution. (shrink)

I forgive the slight spin of sloganeering conveyed by the motto so frequently cited by proponents of a cosmos chock full of organisms: "Life will fed a way." Life is resilient and quite capable (especially in bacterial form) of living in the most damnably improbable places-from nearly boiling ponds in Yellowstone National Park to tiny pores in rocks as deep as two miles below the earth's surface. But even this degree of resilience must work within limits; if life ever evolved (...) on the Martian surface during its initial billion years with running water, the planet's later desiccation probably extinguished our solar system's second experiment in advanced carbon chemistry. (shrink)

Available from UMI in association with The British Library. Requires signed TDF. ;Belief in God is a belief about a matter of fact and existence . I assume that BG is meaningful, coherent and neither probably true or probably false . ;The evidentialist objection to BG presupposes that we have obligations in respect of those beliefs that we accept, this being a voluntary form of assent to propositions . EO claims that acceptance of BG without sufficient evidence in its support (...) is irrational. But we cannot have evidence for all our beliefs; the need to avoid an infinite regress of justification typically leads EO to endorse some form of foundationalism . This allows certain beliefs to be basic ; EO must defend a criterion of proper basicality which excludes BG from that status. Typically, this restricts properly basic beliefs to those that are either self-evident, evident to the senses or incorrigible . ;Plantinga argues that this criterion is self-referentially incoherent and implausible , and claims that BG can be properly basic. This does not commit him to allowing just any belief to be properly basic, because basic beliefs have justifying conditions which allow him to point to differences between BG and obviously irrational beliefs . Criteria for proper basicality are to be arrived at inductively, from sample-sets of the beliefs we do in fact hold as basic . ;However, this procedure can be used to defend the restriction of proper basicality for matter of fact beliefs to those formed, justified and defeated on the basis of sense-experience, and so allows EO to be maintained . BG cannot be formed directly on the basis of religious experience, for this procedure shows none of the features of reliable, and some of the features of unreliable, epistemic practices . Nor is BG related to our trust in epistemic practices as are our fundamental beliefs about matters of fact . ;'Wittgensteinian basicalism' sees BG as an unjustified and unjustifiable cognitive claim constitutive of the religious language-game and form of life . But a Wittgensteinian epistemology rejects metaphysics as illusion, and grants BG rationality only at the cost of sacrificing its objectivity . Attempts to show that BG is presupposed in the assumption that the universe is intelligible fail because scepticism is not self-refuting; we cannot know that the universe is in fact intelligible . ;BG is not analogous to those beliefs we hold without evidence but which are clearly rational. It must be supported by evidence in order to secure acceptance. (shrink)