Recent medical and bioethics literature shows a growing concern for practitioners’ emotional experience and the ethical environment in the workplace. Moral distress, in particular, is often said to result from the difficult decisions made and the troubling situations regularly encountered in health care contexts. It has been identified as a leading cause of professional dissatisfaction and burnout, which, in turn, contribute to inadequate attention and increased pain for patients. Given the natural desire to avoid these negative effects, it seems to (...) most authors that systematic efforts should be made to drastically reduce moral distress, if not altogether eliminate it from the lives of vulnerable practitioners. Such efforts, however, may be problematic, as moral distress is not adequately understood, nor is there agreement among the leading accounts regarding how to conceptualize the experience. With this article I make clear what a robust account of moral distress should be able to explain and how the most common notions in the existing literature leave significant explanatory gaps. I present several cases of interest and, with careful reflection upon their distinguishing features, I establish important desiderata for an explanatorily satisfying account. With these fundamental demands left unsatisfied by the leading accounts, we see the persisting need for a conception of moral distress that can capture and delimit the range of cases of interest. (shrink)

17 essays discussing the role of language in the history of western thought. Since Adam before the Fall named the animals by true insight into their essences, language has never ceased to be the pivot of efforts to understand human nature and our capacity to feel at home in the twin worlds of nature and society. This volume brings together seventeen essays that have appeared in the Journal of the History of Ideasover the last thirty years. Their common theme is (...) the role of language in aspects of the history of western thought from the Renaissance to the nineteenth century. The essays cover questions in epistemology, religion, anthropology, lexicography, evolution, the theory of signs, and the origin of language. Contributors: FRANK L. BORCHARDT, MARGRETA DE GRAZIA, SIDONIE CLAUSS, JAN MIEL, THOMAS C.SINGER, VICTOR ANTHONY RUDOWSKI, JULES PAUL SEIGEL, JAMES McLAVERTY, J.R. KNOWLSON, STEPHEN K. LAND, LIA FORMIGARI, H.J. JACKSON, W. JAY REEDY, V.P. BYNACK, CYMBRE QUINCYRAUB, MICHAEL SPRINKER, S. MORRIS ENGEL. (shrink)

Subjectivism about meaning in life remains a viable option, despite its relative unpopularity. Two arguments against it in the literature, the first by Susan Wolf and the second by Aaron Smuts and Antti Kauppinen, fail. Pace Wolf, lives devoted to activities of no objective value need not be pointless, unproductive, and futile, and so not prima facie meaningless; and, pace Smuts and Kauppinen, subjectivism is compatible with people being mistaken about how meaningful their own lives are. This paper elaborates a (...) novel subjectivist view according to which becoming more fulfilled makes a life meaningful for a person. Becoming more fulfilled is a process that has being more fulfilled as its endpoint, and, as with any process, it can come to a halt before it is complete. More substantively, becoming more fulfilled by some x is a matter of aiming to do various activities well, where doing them well at least partly constitutes benefiting x, and requires that one be more fulfilled by x than one presently is. Finally, this paper shows why the becoming more fulfilled view is to be preferred to the standard subjectivist theory, the fulfillment view, and how it produces intuitive results. (shrink)

Historians of technology have provided important accounts of technological innovation, but they rarely employ concepts which permit a rigorous analysis ofinvention as a mental or cognitive process. This article seeks to address this theoretical lacuna by using concepts adapted from cognitive psychology to compare the mental processes of two telephone inventors, Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison. Specifically, we suggest that invention may be seen as a process in which inventors combine ideas with objects, or what we call mental models (...) and mechanical representations. The strategies by which inventors generate and manipulate these mental models and mechanical representations are what we refer to as heuristics. Using these concepts to narrate the development of the telephone, this article shows how invention can be interpreted as being much more than simply a mysterious act of individual genius. (shrink)

Gamification calls for cogent philosophical analysis and is a valuable opportunity to explore manipulative design, in which users are manipulated into doing something by using an artifact just as it is designed to be used. This chapter analyzes gamification as the implementation of inducements to striving play in artifacts that are not themselves games. Implementing such inducements is a species of a more generic form of design in which users are provided with tools for reasoning, along with scaffolding that putatively (...) justifies using those tools in particular ways and for particular purposes. This chapter further argues that gamification, and this more generic mode of design, is manipulative when, and because, using these tools in such ways serves the designers' hidden purposes. Finally, this chapter argues that using manipulatively gamified or designed artifacts typically hinders us in making our lives more meaningful. (shrink)

We examine and criticise some interpretations of the neuropsychology of the emotions, arguing that emotion and cognition should not be distinguished as distinct entities that can occur independently or be separated physiologically. In the twentieth century the separation of the cognitive from the emotional and the sensory has been challenged within philosophy, psychology, and now neuroscience. Centrifugal anatomical wiring suggests that emotion and sensation cannot be independent from cognition. For emotions to function adaptively, they must incorporate interpretation, anticipation, and problem-solving, (...) a view we call functionalism. Neuropsychological data on the emotions are consistent with these assertions. (shrink)

Two recent papers by Michael Burke bearing upon the persistence of people and commonplace things illustrate the fact that the quest for synchronic ontological economy is likely to encourage a disturbing diachronic proliferation of entities. This discussion argues that Burke's promise of ontological economy is seriously compromised by the fact that his proposed metaphysic does violence to standard intuitions concerning the persistence of people and commonplace things. In effect, Burke would have us achieve synchronic economy (rejection of coincident entities) by (...) postulating strongly counterintuitive transtemporal claims of numerical diversity. The argument is made that the price of Burkean economy is too high. (shrink)

This is the second of five chapters on good, and starts by making the point that it is around the question of the intrinsically good that the chief controversies about the nature of goodness or value revolve, for most theories of value may be divided into those that treat it as a quality and those that treat it as a relation between that which has value and something else ; Ross says that it seems clear that any view that treats (...) goodness as a relation between that which is good and something else denies that anything is intrinsically good. The chapter first discusses R. B. Perry's relational view of value—in the sense of good, and other theories that also identify goodness with some relation, either as a relation between that which is good and some or all of its elements, or as a relation between some or all of its elements, or as a relation between it or some or all of its elements and something else. Next, the psychological theories of good are discussed; these, as a rule, hold that a thing being good means either that some person or persons have some feelings towards it, or some person or persons think it to be good; this is an objective view of good. The rest of the chapter looks at both R. B. Perry's and G. E. Moore's arguments on these theories, at Ross's own views, at badness as incompatible with goodness or as an element of a good thing, at W. M. Urban's work on the question of values, and at B. Croce's arguments on value judgements. Ross concludes that the arguments in favour of thinking of value as an objective are no more successful than those in favour of treating it as a relation, and presents a lengthy validation of his conclusion, based largely on discussion of beauty and goodness. (shrink)

Unlike old soldiers, the rhetoric of the great neither dies nor fades away. And so Hume's celebrated ‘is-ought’ passage still provokes debate.Hume was worried about the relation between ought statements and those supporting them: between ‘tolerence brings peace’ or ‘is God's will’, and ‘so one ought to be tolerant’. He denies the deducibility of the latter from the former, as the ‘ought’ expresses ‘a new relation or affirmation’, ‘entirely different from the others’. And this is commonly taken as saying that (...) the ought statement is ‘different’ and non-deducible, because it is no longer a ‘purely factual statement’, to wit one that makes another ordinarily testable truth claim.However, recent criticism, by W. D. Hudson and others, points out that Hume says other things seemingly inconsistent with this. In the passage, he mentions ‘ought’ and ‘virtue’ interchangeably, and ‘tolerance is virtuous’ as in the same boat as ‘one ought to be tolerant’. But, also, he treats the virtue of an action as sensibly discernible by the approbation which it evokes, and takes us to mean by a virtuous action that we will approve of it on contemplation. (shrink)

Tractatus Politico-Philosophicus (Political-Philosophical Treatise) of W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz proposes a new idea-system. Ideas concerning different topics related to politics are introduced. The work aims to establish the principles of good governance and of a happy society, and to open up new directions for the future development of humankind. It is also in part a critique of the epistemology of early Wittgenstein as presented in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It argues that one can speak about politics and ethics with sense, and that (...) political philosophy is still a viable enterprise for us. This explanation is provided in response to the review of Tractatus Politico-Philosophicus by Katarzyna Heremska and a critical note of Pawel Kloczowski that were both published in Argument 6(1), 2016. (shrink)

By an incomplete sentence we shall understand a declarative sentence that can be used, without variation in its meaning, to make different statements in different contexts. Although the point deserves supporting argument, which we will not provide, sentences whose grammatical subjects are indexical expressions or demonstratives are obvious, plausible examples of incomplete sentences. Uttered in one context the sentence ‘He is ill’ may be used to make one statement, for example, that George is ill, while in another context the very (...) same sentence may be used to make a quite different statement, for example, that Paul is ill. (shrink)

As late as the mid-1970s the term ‘ false consciousness ’ was still applied by critical social theorists to instances of ideological delusion. Yet, in the wake of the postmodernist revolution and its neo-Nietzschean declaration of all truths to be merely truth-effects, a concept of false consciousness appeared impossible to sustain. Drawing on an incident in the history of South African politics, this article reconsiders the ways in which a concept of false consciousness, built upon a representational model of truth (...) and falsity, might assist us in explaining the dynamics of ideological contestation. (shrink)

W. B. Gallie; I *—The Presidential Address: Rationality and the Use of Force, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 71, Issue 1, 1 June 1971, Pages 1–.