Is it generally rational to defer to official stories? On the affirmative view exemplified by Neil Levy, grounds for scepticism cannot outweigh the epistemic authority of the experts presumed to generate them. Yet sociological studies of how expertise is mediated into official communications reveal the epistemic potential of citizens’ collaboratives. These may include, or advocate hearing, dissident experts. Such groups’ epistemic position is arguably analogous to that of the ‘other institutions of civil society’ that Levy sees as underwriting the authority (...) of official stories. An added advantage is that they are able to adhere to deliberative methods of inquiry. By contrast, an official story presupposes that deliberations have concluded, and what remains is to promote the agreed story. This is achieved by strategic communication, which can involve extensive coordination by organisations committed primarily to persuasion rather than truth-seeking. Sometimes it includes blocking dissidents’ deliberative challenges. A case study highlights how even an organisation of indisputable epistemic authority can be politically influenced to block the testimony of its own scientific experts, while uncritical support for its official story is maintained by other institutions of civil society. Hence, an appropriate attitude towards official stories is critical receptiveness rather than automatic deference. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Limits for Uncommunicative Partners How Much Does a Particle Need to Know? Evaluation of Results Simulators Does Nature Simulate?

Values based practice (VBP) is a radical view of the place of values in medicine which develops from a philosophical analysis of values, illness and the role of ethical principles. It denies two attractive and traditional but misguided views of medicine: that diagnosis is a merely factual matter and that the values that should guide treatment and management can be codified in principles. But, in the work of KWM (Bill) Fulford, it goes further in the form of a radical liberal (...) view: that the idea of an antecedently good outcome should be replaced by that of a right process. That however leads to a dilemma as to whether it can account for its own normative status. Given that difficulty, why might one adopt the radical version? I sketch a possible motive drawing on Rorty’s rejection of authoritarianism which replaces objectivity with solidarity as the aim of judgement. But I argue that, nevertheless, this does not justify the rejection of the more modest particularist version of VBP. (shrink)

This is a comprehensive resource of original essays by leading thinkers exploring the newly emerging interdisciplinary field of the philosophy of psychiatry. The contributors aim to define this exciting field and to highlight the philosophical assumptions and issues that underlie psychiatric theory and practice, the category of mental disorder, and rationales for its social, clinical, and legal treatment.

Eventualities and worlds are analysed uniformly as schedules of certain descriptions of eventuality-types (reversing the reduction of eventuality-types to eventualities). The temporal interpretation of modals in Condoravdi 2002 is reformulated to bring out what it is about eventualities and worlds that is essential to the account. What is essential, it is claimed, can be recovered from schedules that may or may not include worlds.

Person Centred Medicine is a substantial and contentious view of healthcare that carries both ontological and epistemological presuppositions. This chapter examines two key aspects: that the person is a central, basic irreducible element in ontology and that person-level knowledge is both important and possible. Some reasons for holding both of these are sketched.

The principal aim of this article is to examine the relations between positioning and belonging in terms of the potential for critique of existing social conditions. The underlying purpose is to inform social scientific engagement with social life in order to illuminate the potential for social transformation via reflexivity. These discussions will be informed by the division of reflexivity into two dimensions: endogenous and referential. It is argued that this enables the social scientist to highlight the pre-reflexive world and render (...) it problematic and demonstrates how the objectivity of the social world is both a presupposition and ongoing achievement of everyday interactions. To that extent, the possibility for social conditions to be otherwise is then open to scrutiny. (shrink)

Harry Collins’s Tacit and Explicit Knowledge characterises tacit knowledge through a number of antonyms: explicit, explicable, and then explicable via elaboration, transformation, mechanization and explanation and, most fundamentally, what can be communicated via “strings”. But his account blurs the distinction between knowledge and what knowledge can be of and has a number of counter-intuitive consequences. This is the result of his adoption of strings themselves rather than the use of words or signs as the mark of what is explicit and, (...) I suggest, it may stem from his earlier response to Wittgenstein’s rules regress. (shrink)

First published in 1997, this book discusses the interplaying factors environmental issues have on justice and property and other social problems. Endeavouring create a discourse on what sustainability means in implementation, each of the contributors to this book approaches this via different theoretical viewpoints.

This paper demonstrates that John Wheeler and Richard Feynman's strategy for avoiding causal paradoxes threatened by backward causation and time-travel can be defeated by designing self-interacting mechanisms with a non-simple topological structure. Time-travel therefore requires constraints on the allowable data on space-like hypersurfaces. The nature and significance of these constraints is discussed.

In "'Chinese Philosophy' at European Universities," Professor Defoort criticizes the institutional "place" of Chinese and "non-Western" studies at European universities. In order to demonstrate the problem, she describes the situation at the KU Leuven Department of History and its Institute of Philosophy. Regarding many of the important issues Defoort raises, I do not feel sufficiently competent to respond. For I am caught in Schwitzgebel's vicious circle : completely ignorant about non-Western philosophy and lacking the required language skills, I cannot engage, (...) as a philosopher, with non-Western texts. At the end of her article, however, Defoort... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Coordinate Systems: Euclidean Space Invariant Quantities Classical Space‐times Special Relativity Consequences of the Lorentz Transformation Lorentz Invariant Quantities.

This chapter contains sections titled: Non‐Euclidean Geometry The General Theory Superluminal Constraints and the GTR Lorentz Invariance and the GTR Quantum Theories in Non‐Minkowski Space‐times The GTR to the Rescue?

Reading James O'apos;Connor's Accumulation Crisis is very confusing. At certain junctures, it reads like the “sequel” to The Fiscal Crisis of the State, elaborating the expanding of his 1973 critique of modem macroeconomic management as a spoils system of special interests. At odier turns, it comes across as a “prequel” to the earlier work, oudining a tortuous logic for the underproduction and accumulation crises that set off the “fiscal crises” he described over a decade earlier. Although not all that new, (...) the plot of the sequel is occasionally interesting. The prequel side of the narrative, however, is very questionable and as old as the hills because, once again, the ancient apparatus of theories of surplus value is trundled out and fired up to “explain” the roots of the current crisis. (shrink)

The rebirth of Christian fundamentalism in the U.S. since 1945 must be acknowledged as a key shift in the post-World War II American political scene. Every president from Truman to Reagan, in one way or another, has recognized the power of Christian symbolism and values as a legitimating animus for the Pax Americana underwritten across the globe by American technology, military force, and culture. While Christian religiosity figured prominently in the classic republican myths of America's Puritan founding and its divine (...) writ of manifest destiny, the U.S. did not officially pledge itself to be “one nation, under God,” or collectively in “In God We Trust,” until the mid-1950s, following congressional action in the age of Ike and Senator McCarthy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the article's first paragraph: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein has remained in print ever since it was published two hundred years ago this year, and has been the basis for innumerable adaptations. While most novels from so long ago have been forgotten, Shelley’s lives on. Why has it remained so popular? Perhaps, at least in part, it’s due to the philosophical themes it addresses: tampering with nature, the dereliction of duties, and the importance of taking (...) responsibility for one’s actions. The tale of a being born without a mother, written by a young woman whose own mother died a few days after giving birth to her, it is perhaps most of all an examination of the need for love in order to survive in a harsh and unforgiving world. It is also a cautionary tale of a man who achieves what he sought to do, only to have his creation turn on him and all he loves. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is the article's first paragraph: The noted philosopher and Santayana scholar Irving Singer, author of the magisterial three-volume work The Nature of Love, died on February 1, 2015, aged 89. Singer was born in Brooklyn on December 24, 1925, and served in World War II. He graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1948, under the G.I. Bill. The following year he wed Josephine Fisk, an opera singer with whom he had four children. They (...) spent a year at Oxford (1949–1950), during which time Singer read The Last Puritan, and in 1950 they took a trip to Italy to meet its author. This trip is related in detail in the delightful article, “A Pilgrimage to Santayana,” which can be found in Singer’s 2000 book George Santayana, Literary Philosopher, an essential work for anyone interested in the life and thought of Santayana. (shrink)

The current higher educational landscape in the UK is marked by complex sets of expectations, accompanied by efforts to encourage universities into diversifying and stratifying functions. Yet the picture is far from clear and a number of tensions and contradictions remain, such as in relation to incentivisation and reward structures which impact differentially on universities. For universities that attempt to translate these agendas into meaningful actions at the local level, the result is a mixture of enthusiasm, engagement, retreat and defence. (...) This article will demonstrate such processes in action through a discussion of the ongoing "Manchester--Knowledge Capital" initiative, which seeks to bring local and regional partners and universities together to create a critically acclaimed global pivot to the emerging knowledge economy. (shrink)

Interpreting Herbert Spencer's political philosophy in the light of persistent criticism that it contains a fundamental contradiction between political individualism and social organicism, this work examines and explains the apparent tensions within his philosophy.