_Sonoran Desert, Stuart Hameroff and Alwyn Scott awoke from their_ _siestas to take margaritas in the shade of a ramada. On a nearby_ _table, a tape recorder had accidentally been left on and the following_ _is an unedited transcript of their conversation._.

In a world with limited resources, allocation of resources to certain individuals and conditions inevitably means fewer resources allocated to other individuals and conditions. Should a patient's personal responsibility be relevant to decisions regarding allocation? In this project we combine the normative and the descriptive, conducting an empirical bioethical examination of how both Norwegian and British doctors think about principles of responsibility in allocating scarce healthcare resources. A large proportion of doctors in both countries supported including responsibility for illness in (...) prioritization decisions. This finding was more prominent in zero‐sum scenarios where allocation to one patient means that another patient is denied treatment. There was most support for incorporating prospective responsibility (through patient contracts), and low support for integrating responsibility into co‐payments (i.e. through requiring responsible patients to pay part of the costs of treatment). Finally, some behaviours were considered more appropriate grounds for deprioritization (smoking, alcohol, drug use)—potentially because of the certainty of impact and direct link to ill health. In zero‐sum situations, prognosis also influenced prioritization (but did not outweigh responsibility). Ethical implications are discussed. We argue that the role that responsibility constructs appear to play in doctors' decisions indicates a needs for more nuanced—and clear—policy. Such policy should account for the distinctions we draw between responsibility‐sensitive and prognostic justifications for deprioritization. (shrink)

This paper explores how work in the philosophy of science can be used when teaching scientific content to science students and when training future science teachers. I examine the debate on the concept of fitness in biology and in the philosophy of biology to show how conceptual pluralism constitutes a problem for the conceptual change model, and how philosophical work on conceptual clarification can be used to address that problem. The case of fitness exemplifies how the philosophy of science offers (...) tools to resolve teaching difficulties and make the teaching of scientific concepts more adequate to the actual state of affairs in science. (shrink)

Euclid’s Elements inspired a number of foundationalist accounts of mathematics, which dominated the epistemology of the discipline for many centuries in the West. Yet surprisingly little has been written by recent philosophers about this conception of mathematical knowledge. The great exception is Imre Lakatos, whose characterisation of the Euclidean Programme in the philosophy of mathematics counts as one of his central contributions. In this essay, we examine Lakatos’s account of the Euclidean Programme with a critical eye, and suggest an alternative (...) picture which builds on his work, but differs in a number of important respects. (shrink)

Natural kinds have been a constant topic in philosophy throughout its history, but many issues pertaining to natural kinds still remain unresolved. This paper considers one of these issues: the epistemic role of natural kinds in scientific investigation. I begin by clarifying what is at stake for an individual scientific field when asking whether or not the field studies a natural kind. I use an example from life science, concerning how biologists explain the similar body shapes of fish and cetaceans, (...) to show that natural kinds play a central epistemic role in scientific explanations that cannot be delegated to other explanatory factors. A task for philosophy, then, is to come up with a theory of natural kinds that adequately accounts for the epistemic role of natural kinds in science. After having sketched the spectrum of available philosophical theories of natural kinds, I argue that none of the available theories adequately performs this task and that therefore the search is still open for a theory that does. (shrink)

"Interplanetary travel is very tempting and exciting because the sky is filled with unlimited globes of varying qualities. the desire to travel to other planets can be fulfilled by the process of yoga, which serves as a means by which one can transfer oneself to whatever planet one likes - possibly to planets where life is not only eternal and blissful but where there are multiple varieties of enjoyable energies. Anyone who can attain the freedom of the spiritual planets need (...) never return to this miserable land of birth, old age, disease and death." --Back cover. (shrink)

The revival of the philosophy of mathematics in the 60s following its post-1931 slump left us with two conflicting positions on arithmetic’s ontological relationship to set theory. W.V. Quine’s view, presented in 'Word and Object' (1960), was that numbers are sets. The opposing view was advanced in another milestone of twentieth-century philosophy of mathematics, Paul Benacerraf’s 'What Numbers Could Not Be' (1965): one of the things numbers could not be, it explained, was sets; the other thing numbers could not be, (...) even more dramatically, was objects. Curiously, although Benacerraf’s article appeared in the heyday of Quine’s influence, it declined to engage the Quinean position squarely, even seemed to think it was not its business to do so. Despite that, in my experience, most philosophers believe that Benacerraf’s article put paid to the reductionist view that numbers are sets (though perhaps not the view that numbers are objects). My chapter will attempt to overturn this orthodoxy. (shrink)

This essay considers the intricate relationship between the thought of William James and the political theory of Harold J. Laski mainly in the years 1915 to 1930. I suggest James's arguments and vocabulary have a greater presence in Laski's work than has been previously detailed. The links between James's and Laski's thought are apparent in Laski's accounts of the self and his descriptions of the nature and structure of social experience; each of these in some way derives from James's psychology, (...) empiricist metaphysics and pragmatic method. The links are demonstrated by Laski's explicit references to James's ideas in his books and letters as well as in his adoption of Jamesian terms, phrases and motifs. This essay also shows that in applying James's ideas to political life Laski brought to light the equivocal nature of James's philosophy. Equally however, reading Laski against the background of James's intellectual legacy helps us understand more clearly some of the ambiguities and tensions in Laski's work; for instance how he could move with apparent ease from advocating political pluralism to supporting centralized planning. Finally, this paper illustrates the complex relationship between political theory and metaphysics. (shrink)

A focussed issue of The Reasoner on the topic of 'Infinitary Reasoning'. Owen Griffiths and A.C. Paseau were the guest editors.

In mathematics, the deductive method reigns. Without proof, a claim remains unsolved, a mere conjecture, not something that can be simply assumed; when a proof is found, the problem is solved, it turns into a “result,” something that can be relied on. So mathematicians think. But is there more to mathematical justification than proof? -/- The answer is an emphatic yes, as I explain in this article. I argue that non-deductive justification is in fact pervasive in mathematics, and that it (...) is in good epistemic standing. (shrink)

A brief article introducing *One True Logic*. The book argues that there is one correct foundational logic and that it is highly infinitary.

Fragt man heute Vertreter verschiedener Disziplinen nach der Bedeutung des Hannoveraner Universalgelehrten Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, so hort man jeweils immer wieder: Leibniz hat Bedeutendes fur unser Fach geleistet. Leibniz beeindruckt nicht nur durch die Exzellenz seiner Leistung, sondern auch durch die Breite seiner Betatigungsfelder. Der aus einer Ringvorlesung an der Leibniz Universitat Hannover hervorgegangene Band fuhrt nun an die Vielfalt der von Leibniz ausgehenden der Leistungen und Anregungen heran. Insbesondere behandeln die Beitrage die Bedeutung von Leibniz fur die Geschichtswissenschaft, die (...) Theologie, die Philosophie, die Rechtswissenschaft und Juristerei, die Politikberatung, das Versicherungswesen, die Mathematik, die Ingenieurwissenschaften und die Sprachwissenschaft. Abgerundet wird der Band durch eine Einfuhrung von Werner Eisner und eine biographische Skizze aus der Feder von Eike Christian Hirsch. (shrink)

"Interplanetary travel is very tempting and exciting because the sky is filled with unlimited globes of varying qualities. the desire to travel to other planets can be fulfilled by the process of yoga, which serves as a means by which one can transfer oneself to whatever planet one likes - possibly to planets where life is not only eternal and blissful but where there are multiple varieties of enjoyable energies. Anyone who can attain the freedom of the spiritual planets need (...) never return to this miserable land of birth, old age, disease and death." --Back cover. (shrink)

In this collection of historic talks on the yoga process set forth by Lord Sri Krsna in the Sixth and Eighth Chapters of the Bhagavad-Gita, Srila Prabhupada deeply probes the nature of consciousness, meditation, karma, death, and reincarnation. Ultimately he describes in detail the process of bhakti-yoga, by which one can easily purify the mind and elevate the consciousness to a state of ultimate peace and happiness.

Reduction and reductionism have been central philosophical topics in analytic philosophy of science for more than six decades. Together they encompass a diversity of issues from metaphysics and epistemology. This article provides an introduction to the topic that illuminates how contemporary epistemological discussions took their shape historically and limns the contours of concrete cases of reduction in specific natural sciences. The unity of science and the impulse to accomplish compositional reduction in accord with a layer-cake vision of the sciences, the (...) seminal contributions of Ernest Nagel on theory reduction and how they strongly conditioned subsequent philosophical discussions, and the detailed issues pertaining to different accounts of reduction that arise in both physical and biological science (e.g., limit-case and part-whole reduction in physics, the difference-making principle in genetics, and mechanisms in molecular biology) are explored. The conclusion argues that the epistemological heterogeneity and patchwork organization of the natural sciences encourages a pluralist stance about reduction. (shrink)

The Bhagavad-gita is the main source-book on yoga and a concise summary of India's Vedic wisdom. Yet remarkably, the setting for this classic of spiritual literature is an ancient Indian battlefield. At the last moment, the great warrior Arjuna begins to wonder about the real meaning of his life. In the Bhagavadgita, Lord Krsna brings His disciple from perplexity to spiritual enlightenment. Bhagavad-gita As It Is is the largest-selling, most widely used edition of the Gita in the world.

An essay review of Gila Sher's *Logical Consequence*.