Background: Autonomy is a central concept in both bioethics and rehabilitation. Bioethics has emphasized autonomy as self-governance and its application in treatment decision-making. In addition to discussing decisional autonomy, rehabilitation also focuses on autonomy as functional independence. In practice, responding to patients with diminished autonomy is an important component of rehabilitation care, but also gives rise to tensions and challenges. Our objective was to better understand the complex and distinctive ways that autonomy is understood and upheld in the context of (...) rehabilitation care by reviewing how autonomy is discussed in the rehabilitation literature. Methods: We conducted a scoping review addressing issues of autonomy in the context of mental and physical rehabilitation. Our process followed three sequential steps. We extracted and analyzed bibliometric information. We then examined how autonomy was defined and conceptualized. Finally, we examined how the articles discussed the roles of rehabilitation health professionals in responding to patient autonomy. Findings: The articles include 16 empirical reports, 17 case studies and 30 theoretical papers. The most common conceptual accounts of autonomy drew upon principlism, rights-based and legal analyses, and relational/social approaches. We identified four broad approaches for responding to patient autonomy: supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating. Conclusion: This review helps clarify some of the ambiguities and conceptual distinctions underlying discussions and practices related to autonomy in rehabilitation. It also draws attention to a wide range of activities that health professionals can undertake with the goal of supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating for patient autonomy in rehabilitation care. (shrink)

Background: Autonomy is a central concept in both bioethics and rehabilitation. Bioethics has emphasized autonomy as self-governance and its application in treatment decision-making. In addition to discussing decisional autonomy, rehabilitation also focuses on autonomy as functional independence. In practice, responding to patients with diminished autonomy is an important component of rehabilitation care, but also gives rise to tensions and challenges. Our objective was to better understand the complex and distinctive ways that autonomy is understood and upheld in the context of (...) rehabilitation care by reviewing how autonomy is discussed in the rehabilitation literature. Methods: We conducted a scoping review addressing issues of autonomy in the context of mental and physical rehabilitation. Our process followed three sequential steps. We extracted and analyzed bibliometric information. We then examined how autonomy was defined and conceptualized. Finally, we examined how the articles discussed the roles of rehabilitation health professionals in responding to patient autonomy. Findings: The articles include 16 empirical reports, 17 case studies and 30 theoretical papers. The most common conceptual accounts of autonomy drew upon principlism, rights-based and legal analyses, and relational/social approaches. We identified four broad approaches for responding to patient autonomy: supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating. Conclusion: This review helps clarify some of the ambiguities and conceptual distinctions underlying discussions and practices related to autonomy in rehabilitation. It also draws attention to a wide range of activities that health professionals can undertake with the goal of supporting, promoting, respecting and advocating for patient autonomy in rehabilitation care. (shrink)

Philosophical discussions have critically analysed the methodological pitfalls and epistemological implications of evidence assessment in medicine, however they have mainly focused on evidence of treatment efficacy. Most of this work is devoted to statistical methods of causal inference with a special attention to the privileged role assigned to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) in evidence based medicine. Regardless of whether the RCT’s privilege holds for efficacy assessment, it is nevertheless important to make a distinction between causal inference of intended and unintended (...) effects, in that the unknowns at stake are heterogonous in the two contexts. However, although “lower level” evidence is increasingly acknowledged to be a valid source of information contributory to assessing the risk profile of medications on theoretical or empirical grounds, current practices have difficulty in assigning a precise epistemic status to this kind of evidence because they are more or less implicitly parasitic on the (statistical) methods developed to test drug efficacy. My thesis is that (1) “lower level” evidence is justified on distinct grounds and at different conditions depending on the different epistemologies which one wishes to endorse, in that each impose different constraints on the methods we adopt to collect and evaluate evidence; (2) such constraints ought to be understood to be different in the case of evidence for risk versus benefit assessment for a series of reasons which I will illustrate on the basis of the recent debate on the causal association between acetaminophen (a.k.a. paracetamol) and asthma. (shrink)

Evolutionary models consider hunting and food sharing to be milestones that paved the way from primate to human societies. Because fossil evidence is scarce, hominoid primates serve as referential models to assess our common ancestors’ capacity in terms of communal use of resources, food sharing, and other forms of cooperation. Whereas chimpanzees form male-male bonds exhibiting resource-defense polygyny with intolerance and aggression toward nonresidents, bonobos form male-female and female-female bonds resulting in relaxed relations with neighboring groups. Here we report the (...) first known case of meat sharing between members of two bonobo communities, revealing a new dimension of social tolerance in this species. This observation testifies to the behavioral plasticity that exists in the two Pan species and contributes to scenarios concerning the traits of the last common ancestor of Pan and Homo. It also contributes to the discussion of physiological triggers of in-group/out-group behavior and allows reconsideration of the emergence of social norms in prehuman societies. (shrink)

The problem of collecting, analyzing and evaluating evidence on adverse drug reactions (ADRs) is an example of the more general class of epistemological problems related to scientific inference and prediction, as well as a central problem of the health-care practice. Philosophical discussions have critically analysed the methodological pitfalls and epistemological implications of evidence assessment in medicine, however they have mainly focused on evidence of treatment efficacy. Most of this work is devoted to statistical methods of causal inference with a special (...) attention to the privileged role assigned to randomized controlled trials in Evidence Based Medicine. Regardless of whether the RCT’s privilege holds for efficacy assessment, it is nevertheless important to make a distinction between causal inference of intended and unintended effects, in that the unknowns at stake are heterogonous in the two contexts. This point has been emphasized by epidemiologists in the last decade. Their main focus is methodological, and regards the fact that bias and confounding do not affect studies on intended and unintended effects in the same way. However, deeper concerns ground the intuition for such a distinction; these are related to the constraints which we impose on evidence and their epistemological justification. My thesis is that such constraints ought to be understood to be different in the case of evidence for risk vs. benefit assessment. I present the recent debate on the causal association between acetaminophen and asthma in order to illustrate the point at issue. (shrink)

Historians and cultural critics face special challenges when treating the nonhuman natural world in the medieval and early modern periods. Their most daunting problem is that in both the visual and written records of the time, nature seems to be both everywhere and nowhere. In the broadest sense, nature was everywhere, for it was vital to human survival. Agriculture, animal husbandry, medicine, and the patterns of human settlement all have their basis in natural settings. Humans also marked personal, community, and (...) seasonal events by natural occurrences and built their cultural explanations around the workings of nature, which formed the unspoken backdrop for every historical event and document of the time. Yet in spite of the ubiquity of nature's continual presence in the physical surroundings and the artistic and literary cultures of these periods, overt discussion of nature is often hard to find. Until the sixteenth century, responses to nature were quite often recorded only in the course of investigating other subjects. In a very real sense, nature went without saying. As a result, modern scholars analyzing the concept of nature in the history of medieval and early modern Europe must often work in deeply interdisciplinary ways. This challenge is deftly handled by the contributors to Engaging with Nature, whose essays provide insights into such topics as concepts of animal/human relationships; environmental and ecological history; medieval hunting; early modern collections of natural objects; the relationship of religion and nature; the rise of science; and the artistic representations of exotic plants and animals produced by Europeans encountering the New World. "As scholars of medieval and early modern Europe increasingly embrace environmental perspectives and animal studies, Engaging with Nature will be recognized as a landmark collection in the field. Taken together, the essays in this volume provide a synthetic overview of critical developments in the many disciplines that are now incorporating the approaches of natural and environmental studies. Each essay represents a substantial advance in scholarship and thought in its particular field. This is an essential collection for literary and cultural historians, and for historians of economy and society, art and ideas." --Rita Copeland, University of Pennsylvania "Engaging with Nature vividly captures the breadth and depth of human interactions with the natural world in premodern Europe. Its multidisciplinary approach generates new questions about how Europeans understood and connected with nature and delves into issues that will interest the specialist and the general reader alike. The book challenges readers to rethink not just the history of human engagement with nature but also the many ways the past has influenced our modern conceptions of ecology and environment." --James Masschaele, Rutgers University "This substantial collection of articles is far more than a response to current obsessions with climate change. It is a thought-provoking demonstration of the inter-disciplinary character of research on medieval history and culture. Students of medieval and early-modern society and economy, literature, philosophy, and art, will find much that is new in these essays, and much to provoke their own thinking about the vexed relationship of human societies with their natural surroundings." --Fredric Cheyette, Emeritus professor of history, Amherst College "Engaging with Nature is a deeply pleasurable volume to read. Using an incredible range of primary and secondary sources, the authors richly realize the methodological promise inherent in the emergent field of medieval and pre-modern studies on the history of nature." --Kathleen Biddick, Temple University "Engaging with Nature is a collection of impeccable scholarship that will make a highly original contribution to the emergent field of medieval and pre-modern studies on the history of nature." --Claire Sponsler, University of Iowa. (shrink)

O artigo que ora apresentamos problematiza a formação e os enfrentamentos da Associação Liberdades Poéticas para atender ao Objetivo Número 16 da ONU, “Paz, Justiça e Instituições Eficazes”. Trata-se de um grupo de voluntários, composto por pessoas de diferentes sexualidades, formações acadêmicas, atuações profissionais e faixas etárias, criado em 2020 durante a pandemia, que tem como premissa reconhecer a prática da leitura como um Direito Humano, indispensável à humanização e à transformação dos sujeitos. Atuamos com remição de pena por leitura (...) no sistema prisional paulista, que confere, às pessoas privadas de liberdade, quatro dias de redução na sentença para cada obra lida, em um limite de dez títulos/ano. Nossa fundamentação teórica sustenta-se em Antonio Candido, em Lynn Hunt, no Conselho Nacional de Justiça (CNJ), na Constituição Federal, entre outros. Concluímos que, apesar da orientação geral da ONU e dos esforços do governo federal com a publicação da Resolução 391/2021, do Conselho Nacional de Justiça, para flexibilizar a remição de pena por meio da leitura, agentes do sistema penitenciário no estado de São Paulo ainda operam sob uma lógica autoritária que não corresponde à do CNJ, tampouco à ODS 16. (shrink)

This book moves beyond traditional readings of Alexis de Tocqueville and his relevance to contemporary democracy by emphasizing the relationship of his life and work to modern feminist thought. Within the resurgence of political interest in Tocqueville during the past two decades, especially in the United States, there has been significant scholarly attention to the place of gender, race, and colonialism in his work. This is the first edited volume to gather together a range of this creative scholarship. It reveals (...) a tidal shift in the reception history of Tocqueville as a result of his serious engagement by feminist, gender, postcolonial, and critical race theorists. The volume highlights the expressly normative nature of Tocqueville’s project, thus providing an overdue counterweight to the conventional understanding of Tocquevillean America as an actual place in time and history. By reading Tocqueville alongside the writings of early women’s rights activists, ethnologists, critical race theorists, contemporary feminists, neoconservatives, and his French contemporaries, among others, this book produces a variety of Tocquevilles that unsettles the hegemonic view of his work. Seen as a philosophical source and a political authority for modern democracies since the publication of the twin volumes of _Democracy in America _, Tocqueville emerges from this collection as a vital interlocutor for democratic theorists confronting the power relations generated by intersections of gender, sexual, racial, class, ethnic, national, and colonial identities. In addition to the editors, the contributors are Jocelyn Boryczka, Richard Boyd, Christine Carey, Barbara Cruikshank, Laura Janara, Matthew Holbreich, Kathleen S. Sullivan, Alvin B. Tillery Jr., Lisa Pace Vetter, Dana Villa, Cheryl B. Welch, and Delba Winthrop. (shrink)

Some of the series' finest lectures have been lost for many years, unavailable to the public in any form -- until now.

The Truth That Never Hurts brings together for the first time more than two decades of literary criticism & political thought about gender, race, sexuality, power & social change. As one of the first writers in the United States to claim Black feminism for Black women in the early seventies, this authors works has been ground breaking in defining a Black women's literary tradition; in examining the sexual politics of the lives of Black & other women of color; in representing (...) the lives of Black lesbians & gay men; & in making connections between race, class, sexuality, & gender. Her essay "Toward a Black Feminist Criticism," is often cited as a major catalyst in opening the field of Black women's literature. This essay also presented the first serious discussion of Black lesbian writing. Essays about racism in the women's movement, Black & Jewish relations, & homophobia in the Black community have ignited dialogue about topics that few other writers address. The collection also brings together topical political commentaries that examine the 1968 Chicago convention demonstrations; attacks on the NEA; the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas Senate hearings; & police brutality against Rodney King & Abner Louima. It also includes a never before published personal essay on racial violence, the day-to-day life of Kitchen Table Press, & the bonds between Black women that make it possible to survive. This authors writing offers a rare combination of intellectual challenge & an accessible personal voice. her commitment to telling the truth about difficult, even volatile issues, makes a unique contribution to American literature & social thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the (...) role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the (...) role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ethics & the Environment 8.2 (2003) 106-125 [Access article in PDF] Leopold's NovelThe Land Ethic in Barbara Kingsolver's Prodigal Summer Peter S. Wenz Introduction Like many good novels, Prodigal Summer's 1 account of love, tragedy, conflict, and choice in human relationships conveys an overall message about how life should be lived. In this case the message corresponds to Aldo Leopold's call for "a land ethic [that] changes the (...) role of Homo sapiens from conqueror of the land-community to plain member and citizen of it." People should "respect... fellow-members and also... the community as such." 2 Barbara Kingsolver explains Leopold's key ideas and updates the Land Ethic by showing how it might guide people today. The present paper selectively displays this relationship, and then suggests some pedagogical advantages of fiction.Prodigal Summer tells three interconnected stories that take place from May through July one year in contemporary rural Kentucky. One story features Deanna Wolfe, who has spent the last 25 months working for the U.S. Forest Service in a wilderness area on Zebulon Mountain where she restores trails and impedes illegal hunting. She has just discovered that coyotes have arrived, but so has Eddie Bondo, a handsome man from the West who hates coyotes because they sometimes kill livestock. [End Page 106]Another story features Lusa Landowski and her husband Cole Widener. Lusa is an entomologist who taught at the University of Kentucky before marrying Cole and moving to his family's tobacco farm that adjoins the national forest where Deanna works. Cole dies early in the novel and Lusa tries to save the family farm.Finally, Nannie Rawley is a senior citizen who grows organic apples nearby and has conflicts with her more senior neighbor, Garnett Walker, who wants to kill weeds with chemicals to keep his property looking neat. Garnett's goal is to cross-fertilize chestnut trees to create an American chestnut that is immune to chestnut blight. Ecocentrism, Hunting, the Biotic Pyramid, and Exotic Species Aldo Leopold's Land Ethic is famously holistic and ecocentric. The ecosystem, a holistic entity, has value over and above, and in most cases more than, the value of its individual components. This ecocentric perspective is summed up in the maxim: "A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise" (1970, 262).Ecocentrism explains Leopold's attitude toward hunting. In many passages, such as the October account of hunting ruffed grouse (58-62) and partridge (62-69), Leopold describes the hunt with approval. However, he disapproves of programs to eradicate keystone predators because their elimination impoverishes ecosystems. His classic account, "Thinking Like a Mountain," concerns wolf eradication. He writes, "I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters' paradise" (138). But he found that wolf eradication harms mountains, that is, ecosystems. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle horn.... In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers. (139-40) Leopold's concept of a biotic pyramid explains why wolf eradication harms ecosystems. According to Leopold, the energy that plants absorb from the sun: [End Page 107]... flows through a circuit called the biota, which may be represented by a pyramid consisting of layers. The bottom layer is the soil. A plant layer rests on the soil, an insect layer on the plants, a bird and rodent layer on the insects, and so on up through the various animal groups to the apex layer, which consists of the larger carnivores.... Proceeding upward, each successive layer decreases in numerical... (shrink)

Die Sophisten waren und sind umstritten. In der Zeit des Perikles, der Hochblüte der griechischen Kultur, als Wanderlehrer in Griechenland tätig, bewirkten sie mit ihrer Lehrtätigkeit, welche die verschiedensten Wissensgebiete umfasste, einen grundlegenden Blickwandel: Ihre Befassung mit Erkenntnistheorie, Rhetorik und Politik lenkte den Blick vom Kosmos zurück auf den Menschen. Indem sie den Menschen in den Mittelpunkt ihres Denkens stellten, ja ihn sogar zum Maß aller Dinge erklärten, wendeten sie sich zugleich gegen die traditionelle Sittlichkeit, die in der Regel religiös (...) begründet war. So waren sie für die einen gefeierte Aufklärer, für die anderen jedoch Zerstörer der Tradition. Diese Ambivalenz in der Einschätzung ihres Wirkens ist bis heute geblieben. Was auch geblieben ist und von Moderne wie Postmoderne aufgenommen wurde, sind wesentliche Ansätze ihres Denkens: z. B. ihr erkenntnistheoretischer Relativismus, ihre Vertragstheorie und ihre Lehre vom Recht des Stärkeren. Weil ihr Denken so aktuell ist, untersucht der vorliegende Band nicht nur die antiken Sophisten, sondern vergleicht sie auch mit ihren modernen und postmodernen Wiedergängern wie bspw. Nietzsche, Butler und Foucault. Mit Beiträgen von Viktoria Bachmann, Thomas Buchheim, Bettina Fröhlich, Benjamin Hahn, Hendrik Hansen, Raul Heimann, Johannes Hoerlin, Vanessa Jansche, Christina Kast, Peter Kainz und Barbara Zehnpfennig. (shrink)

Individual objects have potentials: paper has the potential to burn, an acorn has the potential to turn into a tree, some people have the potential to run a mile in less than four minutes. Barbara Vetter provides a systematic investigation into the metaphysics of such potentials, and an account of metaphysical modality based on them. -/- In contemporary philosophy, potentials have been recognized mostly in the form of so-called dispositions: solubility, fragility, and so on. Vetter takes dispositions as her (...) starting point, but argues for and develops a more comprehensive conception of potentiality. She shows how, with this more comprehensive conception, an account of metaphysical modality can be given that meets three crucial requirements: Extensional correctness: providing the right truth-values for statements of possibility and necessity; formal adequacy: providing the right logic for metaphysical modality; and semantic utility: providing a semantics that links ordinary modal language to the metaphysics of modality. -/- The resulting view of modality is a version of dispositionalism about modality: it takes modality to be a matter of the dispositions of individual objects. This approach has a long philosophical tradition going back to Aristotle, but has been largely neglected in contemporary philosophy. In recent years, it has become a live option again due to the rise of anti-Humean, powers-based metaphysics. The aim of Potentiality is to develop the dispositionalist view in a way that takes account of contemporary developments in metaphysics, logic, and semantics. (shrink)

Cultural accounts of how people facilitate learning extend beyond the five types of teaching outlined by Kline's target article. Rather than focusing so exclusively on individual teaching, cultural accounts examine the mutually constituting efforts of individuals who are teaching, together with those who are learning. Further, cultural research emphasizes the community contexts of people's arrangements for learning and their teaching/learning interactions.

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero (...) develops a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

I examine how co-parents should handle differing commitments about how to raise their child. Via thought experiment and the examination of our practices and affective reactions, I argue for a thesis about the locus of parental authority: that parental authority is invested in full in each individual parent, meaning that that the command of one parent is sufficient to bind the child to act in obedience. If this full-authority thesis is true, then for co-parents to command different things would be (...) for them to contest one another’s authority. The only course that respects the authority of both parents is for co-parents to agree to command the same thing. Further, what is commanded must not result from a ‘capitulation’ by one co-parent, rather, it should result from a compromise. Parental authority involves a duty to deliberate about which commands it is best to give the child. If a command results from a capitulation, one parent will rightly think of themselves as not having fulfilled their parental duty. Parental compromises are not best understood as bargains or conflicts, but by the metaphor of gifts given by each parent out of respect for the other’s authority. (shrink)

This book presents the most important problems of reference and considers their solution. It presupposes no technical knowledge, presents analyses from first principles, illustrates every stage with examples, and is written with verve and clarity. This is the ideal introduction to reference for students of linguistics and philosophy of language.

Dispositions are modal properties. The standard conception of dispositions holds that each disposition is individuated by its stimulus condition(s) and its manifestation(s), and that their modality is best captured by some conditional construction that relates stimulus to manifestation as antecedent to consequent. I propose an alternative conception of dispositions: each disposition is individuated by its manifestation alone, and its modality is closest to that of possibility — a fragile vase, for instance, is one that can break easily. The view is (...) expounded in some detail and defended against the major objections. (shrink)

Abilities are in many ways central to what being an agent means, and they are appealed to in philosophical accounts of a great many different phenomena. It is often assumed that abilities are some kind of dispositional property, but it is rarely made explicit exactly which dispositional properties are our abilities. Two recent debates provide two different answers to that question: the new dispositionalism in the debate about free will, and virtue reliabilism in epistemology. This paper argues that both answers (...) fail as general accounts of abilities, and discusses the ramifications of this result. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Thus Spake Howard Roark:Nietzschean Ideas in The FountainheadLester H. HuntIThe position I will be taking here will seem very peculiar to many people. I will be treating a novel as a discussion of the work of a philosopher—namely, Friedrich Nietzsche. Worse yet, I will be treating it as a discussion that is philosophically penetrating and deserves to be taken seriously. Still worse, the novel is Ayn Rand's early novel (...) The Fountainhead. I think it is safe to say that her reputation, among academics who discuss the works of philosophers, is very low. If the reader will only bear with me, though, I think I can make a case that Rand opens a line of inquiry about Nietzsche's ideas and values that is not only quite interesting in itself but one that ought to be pursued further by others.There has always been ample reason to associate Nietzsche with The Fountainhead.1 He is after all, the only philosopher who is more or less directly quoted in the book.2 Beyond that, Rand's novel has many other passages that students of Nietzsche instantly recognize as conscious references to him or deliberate echoes of his style. In addition, she revealed, in an introduction written for the twenty-fifth anniversary edition, that the following quotation from Beyond Good and Evil had originally stood at the head of the book when it was still in manuscript:It is not the works, but the belief which is here decisive and determines the order of rank to—employ once more an old religious formula with a new and deeper meaning—it is some fundamental certainty which a noble soul has about itself, something which is not to be sought, is not [End Page 79] to be found, and perhaps, also, is not to be lost—The noble soul has reverence for itself.—3She said, in the same introduction, that she removed the quotation (evidently, immediately before publication) for philosophical reasons, because of her "profound disagreement with the philosophy of its author." Nietzsche, she says, was fundamentally "a mystic and irrationalist," and even in this quotation, chosen for its content, insinuates a philosophical position that she regards as erroneous (namely, determinism). Even her statement of what she likes about this passage is rather constrained: "as a poet [ie., not as a philosopher], he projects at times (not consistently) a magnificent feeling for man's greatness, expressed in emotional, not intellectual terms."4It is of course true enough that Rand does disagree with Nietzsche, and for more or less the reasons that she suggests here, but it is also true that the passage she has quoted expresses some ethical themes—nobility, order of rank, the "pathos of distance," and (most obviously) the idea of self-reverence as a characteristic of the ethically good—which are at least as important in The Fountainhead as they are in Nietzsche's writings. Though Rand's spirited disclaimer serves to remind us of her deep differences with Nietzsche, the quotation itself suggests that there might be an interesting philosophical, not merely literary or emotional, connection between The Fountainhead and Nietzsche's ideas. What I would like to show here is that this connection merits a much closer look than it has ever been given heretofore. Not only is the presence of Nietzschean themes in Rand's novel deep and pervasive, but the book actually contains a very interesting and powerful internal critique of one of Nietzsche's most characteristic ideas, a criticism based in large part on values and assumptions that he shares. Before I can set out this critique, I will need to explore some of the positive thematic and philosophical connections.IIOne evening, rather late in the novel, Gail Wynand, the corrupt newspaper publisher and financier, surprises his wife, Dominique, with a present: he has had an architect design a house for them. The architect, she realizes with shock as she sees the drawings for the house, is her former lover, Howard Roark, a man with whom she is still in love. None of this is known to her husband, who innocently tells her that [End Page 80] Roark... (shrink)

Blending evidence-based cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), mindfulness, and profanity, this unexpected guide will show you how to respond to your negative inner voice with one very important phrase: Move on, mother*cker (MOMF)!

It is a familiar point that many ordinary dispositions are multi-track, that is, not fully and adequately characterisable by a single conditional. In this paper, I argue that both the extent and the implications of this point have been severely underestimated. First, I provide new arguments to show that every disposition whose stimulus condition is a determinable quantity must be infinitely multi-track. Secondly, I argue that this result should incline us to move away from the standard assumption that dispositions are (...) in some way importantly linked to conditionals, as presupposed by the debate about various versions of the ‘conditional analysis’ of dispositions. I introduce an alternative conception of dispositionality, which is motivated by linguistic observations about dispositional adjectives and links dispositions to possibility instead of conditionals. I argue that, because of the multi-track nature of dispositions, the possibility-based conception of dispositions is to be preferred. (shrink)

According to essentialism, metaphysical modality is founded in the essences of things, where the essence of a thing is roughly akin to its real definition. According to potentialism (also known as dispositionalism), metaphysical modality is founded in the potentialities of things, where a potentiality is roughly the generalized notion of a disposition. Essentialism and potentialism have much in common, but little has been written about their relation to each other. The aim of this paper is to understand better the relations (...) between essence and potentiality, on the one hand, and between essentialism and potentialism, on the other. It is argued, first, that essence and potentiality are not duals but interestingly linked by a weaker relation dubbed ‘semi-duality’; second, that given this weaker relation, essentialism and potentialism are not natural allies but rather natural competitors; and third, that the semi-duality of essence and potentiality allows the potentialist to respond to an important explanatory challenge by using essentialist resources without thereby committing to essentialism. (shrink)

Some presuppositions seem to be weaker than others in the sense that they can be more easily neutralized in some contexts. For example some factive verbs, most notably epistemic factives like know, be aware, and discover, are known to shed their factivity fairly easily in contexts such as are found in (1). (1) a. …if anyone discovers that the method is also wombat-proof, I’d really like to know! b. Mrs. London is not aware that there have ever been signs erected (...) to stop use of the route… c. Perhaps God knows that we will never reach the stars…. (The examples in (1) are all naturally occurring ones, discovered by David Beaver with the aid of Google; cf. Beaver 2002, exx. 32, 43, and 51, respectively.) On the other hand some other factives, e.g. regret, matter, and be surprised, do not exhibit the same type of behavior: (2) a. If any of the students regrets behaving badly, they’ll let us know. b. It doesn’t matter that the chimpanzees escaped. c. Was Bill surprised that spinach was included? Unlike the examples in (1), those in (2) could not be used appropriately in contexts where the speaker was not assuming that the complement clause was true. Our main concern will be trying to find the cause of this difference. However, before we get to that, we will look more closely at the concept “presupposition” itself, as well as its close neighbor in the linguistic literature, “conventional implicature” (section 2), and also at various ways of getting rid of presuppositions (section 3). In section 4 we will investigate two possible explanations for differences in presupposition triggering – the “lexical alternative” approach of Abusch (2002, 2005), and a suggestion of Ladusaw’s involving detachability of presuppositions. The final section contains concluding remarks. (shrink)

The prototypes of definiteness and indefiniteness in English are the definite article the and the indefinite article a/an, and singular noun phrases (NPs)1 determined by them. That being the case it is not to be predicted that the concepts, whatever their content, will extend satisfactorily to other determiners or NP types. However it has become standard to extend these notions. Of the two categories definites have received rather more attention, and more than one researcher has characterized the category of definite (...) NPs by enumerating NP types. Westerståhl (1985), who is concerned only with determiners in the paper cited, gives a very short list: demonstrative NPs, possessive NPs, and definite descriptions. Prince (1992) lists proper names and personal pronouns, as well as NPs with the, a demonstrative, or a possessive NP as determiner. She notes, in addition, that “certain quantifiers (e.g. all, every) have been argued to be definite” (Prince 1992: 299). This list, with the quantifiers added, agrees with that given by Birner & Ward (1998, 114). Ariel (1988, 1990) adds null anaphoric NPs. (shrink)

In this paper I develop a framework for environmental philosophy on the ground of what I call a radical relationalism based on Whitehead’s thought. Accordingly, relations are ontologically prior to and constitutive of entities rather than being conceived as external link(ing) between them. On this ground an alternative, relational axiology can be developed that challenges the current environmental ethics debate and its dichotomy between intrinsic and instrumental values. In the last section, I show how such an axiology can become an (...) important ally for global environmental justice struggles and help support what the anthropologist Arturo Escobar calls a “decolonial view of nature.”. (shrink)

Ulrich Beck's best selling Risk Society established risk on the sociological agenda. It brought together a wide range of issues centering on environmental, health and personal risk, provided a rallying ground for researchers and activists in a variety of social movements and acted as a reference point for state and local policies in risk management. The Risk Society and Beyond charts the progress of Beck's ideas and traces their evolution. It demonstrates why the issues raised by Beck reverberate widely throughout (...) social theory and covers the new risks that Beck did not foresee, associated with the emergence of new technologies, genetic and cybernetic. The book is unique because it offers both an introduction to the main arguments in Risk Society and develops a range of critical discussions of aspects of this and other works of Beck. (shrink)

Dispositionalists try to provide an account of modality—possibility, necessity, and the counterfactual conditional—in terms of dispositions. But there may be a tension between dispositionalist accounts of possibility on the one hand, and of counterfactuals on the other. Dispositionalists about possibility must hold that there are no impossible dispositions, i.e., dispositions with metaphysically impossible stimulus and/or manifestation conditions; dispositionalist accounts of counterfactuals, if they allow for non-vacuous counterpossibles, require that there are such impossible dispositions. I argue, first, that there are in (...) fact no impossible dispositions; and second, that the dispositionalist can nevertheless acknowledge the non-vacuity of some counterpossibles. The strategy in the second part is one of ‘divide and conquer’ that is not confined to the dispositionalist: it consists in arguing that counterpossibles, when non-vacuous, are read epistemically and are therefore outside the purview of a dispositional account. (shrink)

The standard Kratzerian analysis of modal auxiliaries, such as ‘may’ and ‘can’, takes them to be univocal and context-sensitive. Our first aim is to argue for an alternative view, on which such expressions are polysemous. Our second aim is to thereby shed light on the distinction between semantic context-sensitivity and polysemy. To achieve these aims, we examine the mechanisms of polysemy and context-sensitivity and provide criteria with which they can be held apart. We apply the criteria to modal auxiliaries and (...) show that the default hypothesis should be that they are polysemous, and not merely context-sensitive. We then respond to arguments against modal ambiguity. Finally, we show why modal polysemy has significant philosophical implications. (shrink)

In _Ecce Homo_ Friedrich Nietzsche calls himself "the first immoralist" and adds "that makes me the annihilator _par excellence_". Lester Hunt examines this and other radical claims in order to show that Nietzsche does have a coherent ethical and political philosophy. He uses Nietzsche's writings as a starting point for a critique of a wider, contemporary ethical project - one that should inform our lives as well as our thoughts.

My aim in this paper is to sketch, with a broad brush and in bare outlines, an approach to modal epistemology that is characterized by three distinctive features. First, the approach is agency-based: it locates the roots of our modal thought and knowledge in our experience of our own agency. Second, the approach is ambitious in that it takes the experience of certain modal properties in agency to be the sole distinctive feature of specifically modal thought and knowledge; everything that (...) we know about modality beyond the experience of agency is a matter of applying standard methods of inquiry such as deduction, induction and abductive methods for choosing between theories. Third, the account holds that modal thought and knowledge is, first and foremost, about modal properties that are sufficiently like those encountered in agency. (shrink)

Modal dispositionalism is the view that possibilities are a matter of the dispositions of individual objects: it is possible that p if and only if something has a disposition for p to be the case. We raise a problem for modal dispositionalism: nothing within the theory rules out that there could be necessary, perfect masks, which make the manifestation of a disposition impossible. Unless such necessary perfect masks are ruled out, modal dispositionalism runs the risk of failing to provide a (...) sufficient condition for possibility, and indeed of engendering contradictions. But to rule them out, modal dispositionalism would have to revise a crucial tenet of the view, its localism. (shrink)

This paper explores the prospects for dispositional accounts of abilities. According to so-called new dispositionalists, an agent has the ability to Φ iff they have a disposition to Φ when trying to Φ. We show that the new dispositionalism is beset by some problems that also beset its predecessor, the conditional analysis of abilities, and bring up some further problems. We then turn to a different approach, which links abilities not to motivational states but to the notion of success, and (...) consider ways of implementing that approach. Our results suggest that there are principled disanalogies between abilities and disposition which prevent any dispositional account of abilities from succeeding. (shrink)

Inspired both by our ordinary understanding of the world and by reflection on science, anti-Humeanism is a growing trend in metaphysics. Anti-Humeans reject the Lewisian doctrine of Humean supervenience that the world is “just one little thing and then another”, and argue instead that dispositions, powers, or capacities provide connection and activity in nature. But how exactly are we to understand the shared commitment of this anti-Humean movement? I argue that this kind of anti-Humeanism, at its most general level, is (...) to be understood neither as a view about ontology nor about fundamentality, but rather as a specific claim about what explains what. (shrink)

Compares and contrasts the ethical systems derived from the major religions of the world.

Five leading thinkers on the concept of 'rights' in an era of rightlessness Sixty years ago, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, deprived of her German citizenship as a Jew and in exile from her country, observed that before people can enjoy any of the 'inalienable' Rights of Man--before there can be any specific rights to education, work, voting, and so on--there must first be such a thing as 'the right to have rights.' The concept received little attention at the time, (...) but in our age of refugee crises and extra-state war, the phrase has become the center of a crucial and lively debate. Here five leading thinkers from varied disciplines, including history, law, and politics, discuss the critical issue of the basis of rights and the meaning of radical democratic politics today. (shrink)